Miami, February 22 Donald David Dillbeck, de 59 años y condenado a muerte por un asesinato cometido cuando era menor de edad, will convert el jueves en la persona número 100 ejecutada en Florida desde el reestablishment de la pena capital en 1976, salvo que a call for the salve at the last hour.
This is the first scheduled execution in Florida since 2019, when two took place. The covid-19 pandemic has also paralyzed executions.
The Florida Supreme Court last week denied a stay of execution for Dillbeck and his attorneys then announced they would appeal in federal court.
Attorney Baya Harrison III alleges that Dillbeck suffers from a neural disorder resulting from prenatal alcohol exposure, known by the acronym ND-PAE.
In 1994, when he was just 15, he was convicted of stabbing to death a woman whose car he had stolen from a shopping center parking lot in Talahassee, the state capital. , in 1990.
Dillbeck, who had escaped from a prison serving a life sentence for the shooting death of a police officer, was arrested shortly after crashing the stolen vehicle.
At the 1990 murder trial, he was sentenced to death by lethal injection with eight of 12 jurors voting in favour.
The other four voted for a life sentence.
Currently, for a judge to sentence a defendant to death in Florida, a unanimous jury vote is required, as established by the United States Supreme Court, which considers simple majority sentencing unconstitutional.
The unanimity requirement is something Florida Governor, Republican Ron DeSantis wants to change, as he announced in 2022 after the confessed perpetrator of the shooting that killed 17 people at a Parkland high school (Florida) in 2018, Nikolas Cruz, will get rid of capital punishment for this reason.
There are already bills in both houses of the Republican-dominated Florida Congress to make the change demanded by DeSantis, who the Florida Conference of Catholic Bishops asked in a letter not to sign the bill. permission to execute Dillbeck, but he did so last January.
In the letter, the bishops emphasized that punishing with the death penalty “should be inadmissible.”
US President Joe Biden has enforced a moratorium on federal executions in 2021, after his predecessor, Donald Trump, resumed them during his presidential term.
According to data from the Florida Department of Corrections (Prisons), there are currently 299 prisoners on “death row”, as the place where those who are to be executed are known.
The oldest prisoner is 80-year-old Ecuadorian Nelson Serrano, who was found guilty of three murders which he still claims he did not commit and whose case is considered by human rights organizations as a legal scandal.
The Tampa Bay Newspaper ran an article about Dillbeck’s life in which he recounted that he had been in foster care since he was four years old and started using drugs at age 13.
In addition, he recounts the ordeals he went through when he was imprisoned with adults at the age of 15, from sexual abuse to violence, and points out that during the 1994 trial, several doctors testified that reported that he showed signs of mental problems associated with schizophrenia. . EFE
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