AG: Court should restore death sentence for Okafor
The Florida Supreme Court should restore convicted killer Bessman Okafor’s death sentence rather than requiring a new jury to reconsider whether he should face capital punishment, Attorney General Ashley Moody’s office argued in a petition filed Friday.
The fate of Okafor, who was sentenced to die for the 2012 killing of 19-year-old Alex Zaldivar, has been in limbo since January, when the state’s high court backed away from a 2016 mandate, ruling 4-1 that juries do not need to unanimously agree when recommending a judge impose capital punishment.
“This Court should not require the prosecutors and citizens of Florida to have to go through the empty formality and enormous waste of resources of a new penalty phase based on a decision that is no longer the law in Florida,” Assistant Attorney General Doris Meacham wrote in the March 6 petition.
In the same January ruling, the court’s conservative majority also reinstated the death penalty for Mark Anthony Poole, whose jury had recommend execution by an 11-1 vote. The jury that convicted Okafor, 35, of first-degree murder in 2015 also voted 11-1 to recommend death.
Both men are among dozens of inmates across the state who were granted new sentencing hearings in the wake of a 2016 ruling from the Florida Supreme Court mandating unanimous juries. The current iteration of the high court decided that decision went too far.
Circuit Judge Julie H. O’Kane declined a request from prosecutors to restore Okafor’s death sentence during a Feb. 14 hearing at the Orange County Courthouse, saying she could not overrule the high court’s 2017 mandate.
O’Kane also delayed Okafor’s sentencing hearing, which had been set to begin March 9, with a new jury asked to decide whether the convicted killer should face execution or spend the rest of his life in prison for fatally shooting Zaldivar.
Moody’s office called the previous mandate from the high court’s predecessors “clearly wrongly decided.”
“[Okafor] is no longer entitled to be resentenced,” Meacham said. “… The fact that other defendants may have [benefited] from the
mistake of law does not mean [Okafor’s] rights are being violated, it simply means that others got some relief they did not deserve.”