In a February 16 choice, the court docket denied a number of motions filed by Dillbeck and his authorized crew in a bid to stave off his scheduled February 23 execution by deadly injection. Absent extraordinary intervention, Dillbeck will probably be strapped to a gurney subsequent Thursday within the execution chamber of Florida State Prison and infused with an anesthetic, a paralyzing agent, and a deadly dose of potassium acetate.
Dillbeck’s attorneys argued to the Florida Supreme Court that the execution needs to be known as off on the grounds that Dillbeck has a neurological dysfunction brought on by heavy publicity to alcohol in his mom’s womb. They mentioned that new analysis equates the dysfunction to a extreme psychological incapacity.
Dillbeck’s organic father testified in previous proceedings that the mom drank 18 to 24 cans of beer a day whereas she was pregnant with Dillbeck. He mentioned he left the house after she attacked him with a butcher knife when Dillbeck was two years outdated.
“[The fetal alcohol disorder] causes widespread mind dysfunction that impairs government functioning and impedes improvement of the requisite stage of culpability to justify imposition of the loss of life penalty,” Dillbeck’s attorneys claimed.
The panel of seven justices dominated, nevertheless, that the argument was time-barred and inadmissible on procedural grounds. They discovered that the brand new analysis cited by Dillbeck relies on current proof, and that even when it had been thought-about a breakthrough, Dillbeck took too lengthy to boost the problem in court docket.
The judges rejected the notion that Dillbeck’s dysfunction is on par with mental incapacity that categorically excludes prisoners from being executed.
His intelligence quotient (IQ) is estimated to be round 100, that of a mean individual.
“We have lengthy held that the specific bar of Atkins that shields the intellectually disabled from execution doesn’t apply to people with different types of psychological sickness or mind injury,” the court docket opinion states, referring to a landmark U.S. Supreme Court choice on the execution of mentally disabled prisoners.
Donald Dillbeck murdered Faye Vann in a Tallahassee mall parking zone on June 24, 1990.
Photo by Florida Department of Corrections
The justices additionally denied Dillbeck’s argument that his execution after spending three many years on loss of life row would quantity to merciless and weird punishment beneath the Eighth Amendment. The judges famous that Florida has by no means acknowledged execution following a protracted keep on loss of life row as unconstitutional.
The Florida Supreme Court made it clear its choice was closing: “No rehearing will probably be entertained by this Court, and the mandate shall subject instantly.”
Gov. Ron DeSantis signed Dillbeck’s loss of life warrant on January 23.
The 59-year-old is scheduled to be executed at Florida State Prison in Raiford on February 23 at 6 p.m., marking the primary execution since 2019 for Florida’s greater than 300 prisoners on loss of life row. The state has executed 99 prisoners for the reason that loss of life penalty was reinstated by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1976.
Dillbeck has been imprisoned since he was an adolescent.
Originally from Texas, he was fifteen years outdated when he shot and killed Lee County Sheriff’s Deputy Lynn Hall in Fort Myers Beach on April 11, 1979.
The highschool dropout from Indiana was sitting inside a stolen automobile at a closed seaside park when Hall responded to a suspicious individual grievance and started questioning Hall. Dillbeck fled however Hall chased him down. In the following battle, Dillbeck grabbed Hall’s gun and fatally shot him. He was sentenced to life in jail for the homicide in June 1979.
Dillbeck escaped custody in June 1990 at an offsite vocational program. While on the run, he robbed, slashed, and stabbed Faye Vann, who was alone in her automobile in a Tallahassee mall parking zone as her household shopped. Dillbeck stole her automobile however crashed it close by and was promptly apprehended by police.
Dillbeck was convicted of first-degree homicide, armed theft, and armed housebreaking in reference to Vann’s deadly stabbing. His public defender aggressively lobbied for a life sentence in lieu of execution throughout the 1991 court docket proceedings.
“The penalty the state is seeking is an abomination! The rest of the world seems to know that,” the general public defender mentioned, based on a Tallahassee Democrat report.
“The only abomination in the courtroom today is Donald Dillbeck,” responded a state prosecutor.
In the years following Dillbeck’s 1991 trial, he and his authorized crew pleaded for mercy, citing abuse he suffered by the hands of his alcoholic mom.
His sister testified that their mother would organize them to hope and beat them in the event that they stopped mouthing their prayers. Dillbeck was faraway from the house by the State of Indiana when he was 4 years outdated. His adoptive dad and mom testified that they heard horror tales of his childhood, together with how his mom assaulted him and made him eat rooster bones.
The tales of his darkish upbringing and medical knowledgeable testimony about his alleged mind injury from fetal alcohol publicity failed to influence Florida courts to void his loss of life sentence. A string of habeas corpus petitions and post-conviction motions stretching again to the Nineties fell flat.
In 2020, the court docket rejected an attraction primarily based on his fetal alcohol dysfunction, discovering that he didn’t well timed file for reduction after the situation was formally acknowledged by the medical neighborhood in 2013.