With a scheduled July 15 execution looming, an attorney for convicted killer Michael Bell argued Wednesday that the Florida Supreme Court should halt the execution because key witnesses have recanted testimony.
Attorney Robert Norgard filed a 64-page brief at the Supreme Court, after Duval County Circuit Judge Jeb Branham rejected the arguments Tuesday.
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Gov. Ron DeSantis on June 13 signed a death warrant for Bell, who was sentenced to death in the December 1993 shooting deaths of Jimmie West and Tamecka Smith outside a Jacksonville bar, according to court documents. Bell used an AK-47 rifle to shoot the pair as they got into a car.
Bell, 54, would be the eighth inmate executed this year in Florida. That would match a record number of executions in a year since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976 after a U.S. Supreme Court decision had halted executions. Florida also put to death eight inmates in 1984 and 2014, according to information on the Florida Department of Corrections website.
Court documents said Bell was convicted of committing the murders while seeking revenge for the death of his brother, who had been killed by West’s half-brother, Theodore Wright, earlier in 1993. Bell did not know that Wright had sold the car to West before the shooting, according to the documents.
Bell was sentenced to death in 1995. But after DeSantis signed the death warrant this month, a legal battle began about whether the execution should be carried out.
Norgard has raised a series of issues, including that witnesses recently recanted testimony that helped convict Bell. For example, the brief filed Wednesday at the Supreme Court said witnesses Henry Edwards and Charles Jones last week recanted testimony that allegedly was given to receive favorable treatment from police on other matters.
But during an evidentiary hearing Monday, Edwards and Jones “invoked their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and refused to answer questions about their recantations as well as questions about other topics like police and prosecutorial misconduct in the case,” the brief said.
The brief argued that the men were worried that testimony at the evidentiary hearing could lead to being prosecuted for perjury and that “case law is legion that the state may not use threats of perjury or intimidating tactics which substantially interfere with a witness’ decision to testify for a defendant.”
“It is clear that the threat of perjury was precisely why both recanting witnesses Edwards and Jones changed their minds about testifying,” Bell’s lawyer wrote in the brief. “And had both of the recanting witnesses done so on the record, along with all of the corroborating evidence of police and prosecutorial misconduct as to the other … witnesses, it is reasonable to conclude that the trial court would have granted Bell at the very least a new penalty phase (sentencing) trial.”
But in his decision Tuesday, Branham rejected such arguments about Edwards, Jones and other witnesses.
“A common theme with all of defendant’s newly discovered witnesses is that they all allegedly made incredible statements to investigators … after the death warrant was signed, about systemic prosecutorial misconduct that resulted in all their trial testimony being coerced and false,” Branham wrote. “However, once defendant called them to the stand their testimony did not support defendant’s allegations. The testimony did not demonstrate prosecutorial misconduct, but rather that the state leveraged the law permissibly to prosecute defendant’s crimes.”
The judge added that he found Bell “has failed to prove this evidence, both individually and cumulatively, is of such a nature that there is a reasonable probability of a different outcome had he known about it.”
The state Attorney General's Office on Friday filed an answer brief with the court, saying the request should be denied because "Bell’s arguments on appeal are without merit."
