After a circuit judge rejected arguments Tuesday, Anthony Wainwright has gone to the Florida Supreme Court to try to halt his scheduled June 10 execution in the 1994 murder of a woman who was kidnapped from the parking lot of a Lake City grocery store.
Attorneys for Wainwright filed two appeals and a motion for a stay of execution Tuesday at the Supreme Court. Gov. Ron DeSantis on May 9 signed a death warrant for Wainwright, who was convicted of raping and murdering 23-year-old Carmen Gayheart.
In one of the appeals, attorney Terri Backhus contended that Wainwright’s “death sentence is the product of multiple failures in the legal system.” Among numerous arguments, Backhus wrote that Wainwright’s role in the crimes, compared to the role of a co-defendant, Richard Hamilton, has long been disputed.
The two men had escaped from a North Carolina prison days before Gayheart was kidnapped as she loaded groceries into her Ford Bronco in a Winn-Dixie parking lot. She was murdered in rural Hamilton County.
“For decades, Mr. Wainwright has maintained that, halfway through a six-year sentence for nonviolent offenses, he made a ‘spur of the moment’ decision to follow Hamilton in an escape attempt,” Backhus wrote in what is known as a petition for writ of habeas corpus. “Mr. Wainwright has specifically disputed the courts’ findings that he raped the victim or acted as a triggerperson.”
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Another attorney, Baya Harrison, filed a notice of appeal after Hamilton County Circuit Judge Melissa Olin on Tuesday rejected other arguments aimed at sparing Wainwright.
Olin wrote, for example, that Wainwright contended execution would violate the U.S. Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment because of “newly discovered evidence” about conditions he has such as a neurocognitive disorder. Wainwright argued that the newly discovered evidence related to his father’s exposure to Agent Orange while in the military.
But Olin wrote that Wainwright has long raised issues about cognitive problems.
“That the defendant and defense counsel are only now learning the cause of these conditions does not constitute newly discovered evidence,” Olin wrote.
Also, pointing to aggravating factors that help determine whether defendants are sentenced to death, Olin wrote that “new mitigation evidence of cognitive deficits caused by the defendant’s father’s exposure to Agent Orange” likely would not lead to a life sentence if Wainwright received a new sentencing proceeding.
“The claim is untimely and the aggravators and facts present in this case would greatly outweigh any proposed mitigation,” the judge wrote. “For the foregoing reasons, the defendant cannot meet the standard to set aside his death sentence based on newly discovered evidence.”
A document filed last year at the U.S. Supreme Court by the Florida Attorney General’s Office in an unsuccessful appeal by Wainwright said Wainwright and Hamilton escaped from a prison in Newport, N.C., stole a Cadillac and burglarized a home, where they took two rifles.
After driving to Florida, they decided on April 27, 1994, to steal another car because the Cadillac was overheating, according to the court document. They drove into the Winn-Dixie parking lot in Lake City and saw Gayheart.
Hamilton forced her into the Bronco at gunpoint and drove away, with Wainwright following in the Cadillac. They subsequently ditched the Cadillac and headed north on Interstate 75 before pulling off into a wooded area, where Gayheart was raped and killed, the document said
Wainwright, now 54, and Hamilton, who has died, were arrested after a shootout with police in Mississippi, according to the document.
They were tried together with separate juries in Clay County, after juries could not be seated in Hamilton County.
