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After U.S. Supreme Court decision, old cases hint at what's next for Florida's death penalty system

 
Cary Michael Lambrix, 55, is set to die Feb. 11. His appeal goes to the state Supreme Court Feb. 2.
Cary Michael Lambrix, 55, is set to die Feb. 11. His appeal goes to the state Supreme Court Feb. 2.
Published Jan. 17, 2016

In the wake of a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision that struck down the way Florida sentences people to death, the first glimpse of what comes next may lie in the case of a man who is weeks away from an executioner's needle.

Right now, Cary Michael Lambrix, 55, sits inside a death watch cell in Florida State Prison, one of two inmates with active death warrants. He is set to die Feb. 11.

Lambrix, convicted of a 1983 double murder in Glades County, is one of more than 140 of Florida's 390 death row inmates who have exhausted their appeals.

Theoretically, all it would take is the stroke of the governor's pen to send any of those 140 condemned prisoners on a path to the execution chamber.

But Tuesday's decision in the case of Hurst vs. Florida has put Lambrix's execution in doubt. His attorneys have asked the state Supreme Court to spare his life. At the same time, the state is pushing to have Lambrix executed as scheduled. The Florida Supreme Court will hear oral arguments Feb. 2.

Whatever the court decides for Lambrix could set the tone for the rest of the 390 inmates on death row, including those who have long exhausted their appeals.

Will the Hurst decision re-ignite those old cases? Will long-condemned prisoners suddenly face the possibility of new trials? Recent legal developments provide a few hints.

"Each case will have to be looked at individually," said Marie Louise Samuels Parmer, a Tampa lawyer whose focus is death penalty appeals. "But it certainly calls into question the validity of many death sentences in Florida."

What happens next in Florida could be similar to what happened in Arizona and three other states in the wake of Ring vs. Arizona in 2002. Like Hurst, that landmark Supreme Court ruling dictated that juries, not judges, must make the ultimate decisions about the death penalty.

When it came down, many anticipated the Ring decision would overturn hundreds of death sentences. But a second decision two years later declared that Ring was not retroactive. It applied only to about 30 cases still in their early stages of appeals.

But Florida has its own issues relating to retroactivity. A number of state Supreme Court cases have grappled with it. At the heart of many of those is a rule which says that a change in law has to be "fundamentally significant" to be considered retroactively in a capital case.

In 2015, the Florida Supreme Court examined the issue of retroactivity in a case spawned from an earlier U.S. Supreme Court ruling, one that barred juveniles from serving life sentences. The state court said that decision was fundamentally significant, applying it to long-closed cases in Florida.

The pair of decisions helped usher in new sentencing hearings for hundreds of Florida prisoners serving life sentences for crimes committed when they were younger than 18.

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"Florida's retroactivity rule turns on the fundamental significance of the decision," said Karen Gottlieb, co-director of the Florida Center for Capital Representation at Florida International University. "Hurst, I believe, is fundamentally significant."

The machinery of the state's death penalty system began to slow even before the Hurst decision. Last year, federal judges in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida in Tampa, bracing for Hurst, halted ongoing appeals in several local cases.

Those included the Pasco County case of Samuel Jason Derrick, now 48. He was convicted in the 1988 of stabbing a convenience store owner during a robbery. During his sentencing in 1991, jurors told a judge they were deadlocked — six votes for death, six for life.

A judge explained that a death sentence required a majority. They returned with a death recommendation. The vote was 7 to 5.

Derrick's attorney, Harry Brody, has argued that the split vote merited a life sentence for his client. Citing that and other issues, he has tried to negotiate a deal with prosecutors.

"As of right now, it seems like he should get a new trial," Brody said. "We'll ask for as much as we can get."

Other death row cases whose federal appeals are on hold pending Hurst include:

• Milford Byrd, now 66, who assisted two other men in strangling his wife, Debra Byrd, in Hillsborough County in 1982. In his case, the jury unanimously recommended the death penalty. Litigated for more than 30 years, Byrd's is the oldest death row case from the Tampa Bay area.

• William Deparvine, now 63, who killed Richard and Karla Van Dusen after he met the Pinellas County couple to purchase a pickup truck they were selling. A jury recommended death by a vote of 8 to 4.

• Terance Valentine, now 66, who tortured and killed his ex-wife's new husband in Tampa in 1988. Convicted twice, his most recent trial saw a jury recommend the death penalty by a vote of 10 to 2.

• Willie Crain, now 69, who kidnapped and killed 7-year-old Amanda Brown in 1998. A jury's vote for the death penalty was unanimous.

• Ray Johnston, now 61, who beat and strangled two women in Hillsborough County in 1997. A jury was unanimous in recommending death in one case; in the other, a second jury voted for death 11 to 1.

All those cases appear poised to raise the issue. None of those inmates is on the Florida Supreme Court's list of 140 inmates who have exhausted their state and federal appeals and are now eligible for a death warrant.

"You sort of had a feeling this was going to happen when the court took a case that has a 7 to 5 jury vote," said Charles Rose, a professor at Stetson University College of Law.

"I think every single one of them will be appealed, because death is different."

Contact Dan Sullivan at dsullivan@tampabay.com or (813) 226-3386. Follow @TimesDan.