Appeal Goes to Florida Supreme Court as Execution Nears

TALLAHASSEE — Attorneys for Death Row inmate Edward Zakrzewski on Monday appealed to the Florida Supreme Court after an Okaloosa County circuit judge refused to halt his scheduled July 31 execution in the murders of his wife and two children.

Circuit Judge Lacey Powell Clark issued a 13-page decision rejecting a series of arguments, including that Zakrzewski would not be eligible for execution under a current law about jury recommendations in death-penalty cases.

Zakrzewski received three death sentences in the 1994 murders of his wife, Sylvia, his 7-year-old son Edward and his 5-year-old daughter Anna. He committed the murders in their Okaloosa County home after his wife wanted a divorce, according to court records.

A jury recommended two death sentences by 7-5 votes and deadlocked 6-6 on a third recommendation, according to arguments filed last week in circuit court by Zakrzewski’s attorneys. The circuit judge during the 1996 sentencing proceeding, G. Robert Barron, issued three death sentences. That included overriding the jury on the deadlock, which would have led to one life sentence.

In the arguments filed last week, Zakrzewski’s attorneys pointed to current state law, which requires that at least eight jurors recommend death for such a sentence to be imposed. In the past, only a majority recommendation was required. The attorneys argued that executing Zakrzewski would be “arbitrary” and violate the state and federal constitutions.

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“If a jury returned those votes today, Mr. Zakrzewski would be ineligible for a death sentence and instead, it would be mandatory to sentence him to life in prison without the possibility of parole,” the attorneys wrote.

The attorneys added, “Worse yet, on the third count, Mr. Zakrzewski should have received a life sentence back in 1996, because the jury voted 6-6 for a sentence of life in prison. Instead, the trial judge overrode the jury’s life recommendation. … That is two less jurors than what would be required to receive a death sentence today, and arguably unconstitutionally imposed even at the time that Mr. Zakrzewski was sentenced.”

But Clark, in her decision Monday, said a rule requires that motions to vacate convictions and death sentences must be filed within one year after judgments are final. She wrote that Zakrzewski is seeking to have his death sentences commuted to life in prison or to have a new sentencing proceeding, but that his “judgment and sentence became final decades ago, and he fails to establish how any of the exceptions to the one-year time limit in (the) rule … apply to his claim.”

Also, Clark wrote that Zakrzewski did not establish how the current death-sentencing law applies “retroactively” to his case.

Gov. Ron DeSantis on July 1 issued a death warrant for Zakrzewski, 60, who could become the ninth inmate executed in Florida this year. The state is scheduled Tuesday to execute Michael Bell in the 1993 murders of two people in Jacksonville.

If both executions are carried out, it would set a modern-era record for executions in a year in Florida. The record of eight executions was set in 1984 and 2014. An appeal in the Bell case was pending Monday afternoon at the U.S. Supreme Court.

Clark’s ruling said Zakrzewski hit his wife with a crowbar, choked her with a rope and hit her with a machete. He killed the children with a machete.

The jury recommended that he be sentenced to death in the murders of his wife and son and life in prison in the murder of his daughter, Barron wrote in the 1996 sentencing order.

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