Saying convicted killer Edward Zakrzewski is seeking to “once again turn back the clock to undo his three death sentences,” the Florida Attorney General’s Office on Monday urged the U.S. Supreme Court to reject a last-ditch attempt to prevent Zakrzewski’s scheduled Thursday execution.
The state’s attorneys filed documents arguing the Supreme Court should deny a petition filed by Zakrzewski’s lawyers and a related motion for a stay of execution. Zakrzewski was sentenced to death for using a crowbar, a rope and a machete to murder his wife and two children in 1994 in their Okaloosa County home.
“Review of Zakrzewski’s petition (by the U.S. Supreme Court) would be unworthy under normal circumstances, much less on the eve of an execution,” the state’s attorneys wrote in one of the documents. “Further, he has been given decades more process than he has been due, given the death sentences he earned for brutally murdering his wife and the unthinkable, murdering of his two young children with a machete. A stay of his execution is not merited.”
Zakrzewski’s lawyers went to the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday, two days after the Florida Supreme Court rejected arguments aimed at preventing the execution. If the execution is carried out at Florida State Prison, Zakrzewski, 60, would be the ninth inmate put to death by lethal injection this year in the state, setting a modern-era record.
The arguments at the U.S. Supreme Court center on jury recommendations in 1996 before Circuit Judge G. Robert Barron issued three death sentences for Zakrzewski. The jury voted 7-5 to recommend death sentences in the murders of Zakrzewski’s wife, Sylvia, and 7-year-old son, Edward. The jury deadlocked 6-6 in its recommendation in the murder of Zakrzewski’s 5-year-old daughter, Anna.
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Barron overrode the jury decision on the deadlock, which otherwise would have led to one life sentence. Also, current Florida law requires that at least eight jurors recommend death for such a sentence to be imposed, while almost all other states that have the death penalty require unanimous jury recommendations.
Zakrzewski’s attorneys contend that executing him after the 7-5 recommendations and the override would be unconstitutional.
“The state of Florida continues to be an extreme outlier when it comes to capital punishment,” Thursday’s motion for a stay of execution said. “Mr. Zakrzewski’s death sentences and impending execution stand in violation of the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. Bare majority jury recommendations and jury overrides have not only been abolished in Florida, but also do not comport with the evolving standards of decency.”
But Okaloosa County Circuit Judge Lacey Powell Clark on July 14 and the Florida Supreme Court last week rejected such arguments. The Florida Supreme Court backed Clark’s conclusion that the arguments about the constitutionality of the death sentences were “untimely, procedurally barred, and meritless.”
The Florida Supreme Court said Zakrzewski had raised similar issues in previous appeals and that Barron, at the time of the sentencing, had the power to override the jury’s recommendation in the murder of Anna Zakrzewski if the facts were “so clear and convincing that virtually no reasonable person could differ,” with justices partially quoting from a legal precedent.
In the documents filed Monday, the state’s attorneys said the disputed issues related to state laws and, as a result, were something the U.S. Supreme Court should not take up. Also, the state’s attorneys contended that the U.S. Supreme Court has “denied review of substantially similar Eighth Amendment questions in three Florida capital cases” in 2023 and early this year.
“Zakrzewski seeks to once again turn back the clock to undo his three death sentences, as he has unsuccessfully attempted to do over the past three decades,” the state’s attorneys wrote in opposing a stay of execution.
Zakrzewski committed the murders after his wife wanted a divorce. He fled to Hawaii after the murders and lived there for four months before turning himself in, according to the Florida Supreme Court decision. He pleaded guilty to the murders.
Gov. Ron DeSantis on July 1 signed a death warrant for Zakrzewski. Florida has executed eight inmates this year, matching a modern-era record set in 1984 and 2014. That record represents the time since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976 after a U.S. Supreme Court decision halted executions in 1972.
DeSantis also has signed a death warrant for Kayle Barrington Bates, who was convicted in the 1982 murder of a woman who was abducted from a Bay County insurance office. Bates is scheduled to be executed Aug. 19.
