Killer of UM linebacker Marlin Barnes faces Death Row return
Prosecutors are asking a judge to return to Death Row the man who used a shotgun to fatally beat University of Miami football player Marlin Barnes in 1996.
The request marks the first time the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office has sought to reinstate the death penalty on a former Death Row inmate since a controversial Florida Supreme Court decision in January determined that jurors do not need to be unanimous in meting out execution as punishment.
Labrant Dennis, 48, is now the latest of about 100 convicted murderers who had their death sentences overturned over the past four years thanks to a series of rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court and Florida Supreme Court. They now face a possible return to Death Row amid further legal fights.
The Florida Supreme Court, which has shifted significantly more conservative under Gov. Ron DeSantis, will ultimately decide in the coming months whether inmates such as Dennis should have their death sentences reinstated. Over the summer, justices heard arguments over whether two other former Death Row inmates, Bessman Okafor and Michael James Jackson, should have their death sentences reinstated.
“It’s a big decision — 100 people’s lives will be impacted,” said Hannah Gorman, director of the Florida Center for Capital Representation at Florida International University’s College of Law, which tracks the state’s death-penalty cases.
In a court document filed last week, Miami-Dade prosecutors say Dennis is no longer entitled to a new sentencing hearing — which would require the swearing in of jurors to reconsider evidence of the crimes — because of the Florida Supreme Court’s decision in January.
“In addition to the incalculable emotional toll on victims’ family members, it would be an enormous waste of both the bench and bars’ time, as well as citizens’ time who are called for jury duty to require new penalty phases,” wrote MiamiDade Assistant State Attorney Christine Zahralban, the head of the legal unit.
For decades, Florida was considered an outlier, one of of the few states that did not require a jury to decide unanimously on sentencing someone to die for a capital offense. Jurors issued bare majority “advisory” recommendations. Judges were the ones to impose the death penalty.
But then came the case of Timothy Lee Hurst, who murdered a Pensacola fast-food restaurant worker. In January 2016, the U.S. Supreme Court declared the state’s death-penalty sentencing system was unconstitutional because it gave too little power to juries.
Florida lawmakers responded by rewriting the state law, replacing the judge’s override and requiring a vote of at least 10 of 12 jurors to sentence someone to death. But the Florida Supreme Court later ruled that the new law was unconstitutional because jury verdicts need to be unanimous, and that Hurst was entitled to a new sentencing hearing.
The Florida Legislature eventually passed a law mandating that unanimous juries were needed to give out a death sentence — a law that still stands now. (Major criminal trials have been largely paused because of the coronavirus pandemic, but for all current defendants facing the death penalty, jurors must be unanimous in deciding on death.)
The state’s high court also ruled that the Hurst decision will apply to most cases completed after 2002 — in all, at least 151 Death Row inmates were entitled to new sentencing hearings.
Since 2016, 37 former Death Row inmates in Florida wound up getting new sentences of life in prison, according to FIU’s Center for Capital Representation. That includes Victor Guzman, who was sentenced
As the Florida Supreme Court weighs the fate of 100 ex-Death Row inmates, prosecutors are asking that Labrant Dennis have his death sentence reinstated. IT’S A BIG DECISION — 100 PEOPLE’S LIVES WILL BE IMPACTED. Hannah Gorman, director of the Florida Center for Capital Representation at Florida International University’s College of Law.
to life in prison for the brutal stabbing murder of 80year-old Severina Dolores Fernandez in Little Havana in 2000.
Another eight Florida inmates again received the death penalty.
There remain about 100 ex-Death Row inmates whose death sentences had been vacated, and were awaiting new sentencing hearings, according to the representation center.
Then, in January, a newly constituted Florida Supreme Court issued a decision in Poole v. Florida that stunned legal observers. The court backtracked on its 2016 decision in Hurst — saying it had “erred” three years earlier in ruling that juries had to be unanimous to deliver the death penalty.
Opponents of the death penalty, and many legal scholars, criticized the decision as a flagrant violation of legal precedent. “They are playing fast and loose with the law and fundamentally undermining the confidence of the public in the Court’s decisions,” said Stephen Harper, a former Miami-Dade assistant public defender who recently retired as the director of the FIU center.
Suddenly, inmates who had returned to local jails to await new sentencing hearings were unsure of what would happen.
That includes inmates such as Joel Lebron, who was part of a group of young men who kidnapped 18-year-old Ana Maria Angel and her boyfriend from South Beach. Lebron and the others slit the boyfriend’s throat, leaving him to die, and gang-raped Angel before Lebron shot her to death as she begged for her life on the side of Interstate 95 in Palm Beach County.
By a vote of 9-3, a jury recommended Lebron be put to death. A Miami-Dade judge agreed and sentenced him to die, before his sentence was overturned because of Hurst.
Another high profile case is that of Noel Doorbal and Daniel Lugo, two Miami bodybuilders convicted of the kidnapping and grisly dismemberment murders of businessman Frank Griga and his girlfriend, Krisztina Furton. The saga was later made into “Pain and Gain,” starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, a movie that angered the families of the murder victims.
Doorbal and Lugo, originally sentenced to death, are now in a Miami-Dade jail waiting to see if they will indeed get new sentencing hearings.
In Dennis’ case, he was convicted in the 1996 murders of UM linebacker Barnes and his friend, Timwanika Lumpkins, in a campus apartment. Prosecutors said Dennis, Lumpkins’ former boyfriend, savagely beat them to death with a shotgun barrel in a jealous rage.
By a vote of 11-1, the jury voted to give Dennis the death penalty.
After Hurst, the Florida Supreme Court in July 2017 overturned Dennis’ death penalty. But after the court backtracked in Poole v.
Florida, prosecutors said Dennis is not entitled to a new sentencing.
The reasons: Jurors also unanimously convicted Dennis of additional felonies, including burglary with assault or battery while armed and another murder count. Those convictions count as a “statutory aggravating circumstance” required to mete out the death penalty, according to a motion filed by the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office. “It would truly be a miscarriage of justice to require the State and the victims’ family to go through another sentencing when it is apparent that defendant’s sentence is entirely legal, appropriate and the trial court agreed,” prosecutor Zahralban wrote. Across the state, judges have reinstated the death penalty for at least 10 inmates, according to the FIU center. Six of those are from the Fourth Judicial Circuit, which includes Duval, Nassau and Clay counties, long considered one of the most aggressive regions in pursuing the death penalty. One of those inmates is James Belcher, who was sentenced to die for strangling 29-year-old Jennifer Embry in Duval County in 1996. In Broward County, prosecutors are asking for the reinstatement of the death penalty for Howard Steven Ault for the murder of two young children, one of whom he raped, in 1996. Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, a non-profit that analyzes capital litigation policy, stressed that no one has been returned to Death Row because the Florida Supreme Court has yet to decide the fate of the inmates. He said he believes the Florida Supreme Court would be again discarding legal precedent if it reimposes the death sentences. “No one yet has had a resentencing hearing taken away from them, and reimposed death sentences upheld by the Florida Supreme Court,” he said, adding: “It’s important to note this is court-created chaos.”