Miami, February 19 Donald David Dillbeck, 59 and on death row in Florida for the 1990 murder of a woman, will appeal his case in federal court, after the state Supreme Court rejected the appeal. week the suspension of his execution, scheduled for next Thursday.
“We are running out of time” and we are “working under a lot of pressure,” Baya Harrison III, Dillbeck’s lawyer, admitted on Saturday in statements to the local newspaper News-Press, affiliated with USA Today.
The Florida Supreme Court denied the defense’s motion to stay the execution. His attorney alleged that the convict suffered from a neural disorder resulting from prenatal alcohol exposure, known by the acronym ND-PAE, which influenced his behavior.
But the denial from Florida’s highest court means the lethal injection of Dillbeck, whose execution was ordered last month by state Governor Ron DeSantis and scheduled for next Thursday, remains in place.
If the execution goes ahead, it will be the first in the state of Florida since August 2019, when Gary Ray Bowles received a lethal injection for a murder in 1994.
Dillbeck was sentenced to death in 1994 for stabbing Faye Vann to death in a shopping mall parking lot in Talahassee, the state capital, during an armed robbery in 1990.
According to court documents, Dillbeck fatally stabbed Fann, who was expecting relatives, after the woman resisted the assault. After that, the man left the scene in the vehicle but crashed into his flight and was eventually arrested by police.
This event took place shortly after Dillbeck escaped from a jail where he was serving a life sentence for the 1979 murder of Officer Dwight Lynn Hall, a member of the Lee County Sheriff’s Office. , who, in a struggle, grabbed the gun and shot him twice.
Dillbeck, who was 15 at the time, confessed to the crime and about two months later pleaded guilty to first-degree murder, after a plea bargain to avoid the death penalty.
DeSantis’ order authorizing Dillbeck’s execution drew a response from opponents of capital punishment, including the Florida Conference of Catholic Bishops, whose executive director, Michael Sheedy, in a letter called on the governor “to choose the life of Mr. Dillbeck as a result of damage caused by the application of the death penalty in Florida”.
“Its use is an affront to the dignity of the person and a denunciation of the low value placed on human life itself in society,” Sheedy added in his letter dated February 6, in which he argues that “The death penalty should be inadmissible.”
Since 2017, jury unanimity has been required in Florida for a judge to impose the death penalty after that year the state’s then-Governor, current Florida Senator Rick Scott, signed a law that harmonizes state law with the ruling of the United States. Supreme Court which judges “unconstitutional” to condemn to death by a simple majority.
That demand has been challenged by Governor DeSantis since a jury failed to agree unanimously to suggest capital punishment for Nikolas Cruz, who killed 17 high school students and staff. Marjory Stoneman Douglas of Parkland in February 2018.
According to a website devoted to the death penalty in Florida, since 1976, 101 convicts have been executed and 323 people, including three women, are waiting on “death row” to serve their sentences. ECE
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