Bowles v. State

• Decision Date: 13 August 2019
• Docket Number: No. SC19-1264,No. SC19-1184,SC19-1184,SC19-1264
• Parties: GARY RAY BOWLES, Appellant, v. STATE OF FLORIDA, Appellee. GARY RAY BOWLES, Petitioner, v. MARK S. INCH, etc., Respondent.
• Court: Florida Supreme Court

GARY RAY BOWLES, Appellant,
v.
STATE OF FLORIDA, Appellee.

GARY RAY BOWLES, Petitioner,
v.
MARK S. INCH, etc., Respondent.

No. SC19-1184
No. SC19-1264

Supreme Court of Florida

August 13, 2019

PER CURIAM.

Gary Ray Bowles, a prisoner under sentence of death and an active death warrant, appeals the postconviction court's order summarily denying his successive motion for postconviction relief filed under Florida Rule of Criminal

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Procedure 3.851. We affirm the denial of relief, and we also deny the petition for a writ of habeas corpus and the motions to stay his execution that Bowles filed in this Court.¹

I. BACKGROUND

Bowles confessed and pleaded guilty to the 1994 murder of Walter Hinton, who had allowed Bowles to move into his home in exchange for Bowles' help in moving personal items. Bowles v. State, 716 So. 2d 769, 770 (Fla. 1998). Specifically, Bowles dropped a concrete block on Hinton's head while Hinton was sleeping, then manually strangled a conscious Hinton, and subsequently "stuffed toilet paper into Hinton's throat and placed a rag into his mouth." Id. On direct appeal, this Court affirmed the first-degree murder conviction but remanded for a new penalty phase. Id. On direct appeal of the resentencing (where the jury unanimously recommended death), this Court upheld Bowles' death sentence. Bowles v. State, 804 So. 2d 1173, 1175 (Fla. 2002). The resentencing trial court based the prior violent felony aggravator on "two prior similar murders for which the defendant was convicted after the first sentencing hearing" as well as two other prior violent felony convictions. Id. at 1176.

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In 2008, this Court upheld the denial of postconviction relief and denied habeas relief. Bowles v. State, 979 So. 2d 182, 184, 194 (Fla. 2008). In so doing, this Court ruled that trial counsel was not ineffective for failing to call an expert to testify regarding mitigation, where the expert had informed counsel that she would have to discuss the "three additional murders that Bowles had committed, which the State was not going to introduce unless the defense opened the door to them." Id. at 187-88. And in 2018, this Court affirmed the denial of Bowles' successive postconviction motion, which he had filed in June 2017, ruling that Hurst² does not apply retroactively to Bowles' death sentence. See Bowles v. State, 235 So. 3d 292, 292 (Fla. 2018).

On October 19, 2017, Bowles filed another successive postconviction motion, raising an intellectual disability claim for the first time. Bowles filed the final version of this motion after the governor signed his death warrant on June 11, 2019. Bowles' final motion (entitled "Amended Rule 3.851 Motion for Postconviction Relief in Light of Moore v. Texas,³ Hall v. Florida,⁴ and Atkins v.

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Virginia⁵") and its appendix noted an IQ test score of 74 as well as prior IQ test scores of 80 and 83. After holding a case management conference, the postconviction court summarily denied Bowles' intellectual disability claim as untimely.

II. ANALYSIS

In this Court, Bowles challenges the summary denial of his intellectual disability claim and the denial of certain records requests filed after the governor signed his death warrant. Bowles also filed a habeas petition in this Court, alleging that national death penalty trends demonstrate that his execution would constitute cruel and unusual punishment. We affirm the postconviction court's denial of relief and deny his habeas petition.

(1) Intellectual Disability

Bowles first challenges the postconviction court's summary denial of his intellectual disability claim, but we affirm the postconviction court.

A postconviction court's decision regarding whether to grant an evidentiary hearing is a pure question of law and is reviewed de novo. Mann v. State, 112 So. 3d 1158, 1162 (Fla. 2013). "If the motion, files, and records in the case

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conclusively show that the movant is entitled to no relief, the motion may be denied without an evidentiary hearing." Fla. R. Crim. P. 3.851(f)(5)(B).

This Court has previously held that similarly situated defendants were not entitled to relief based on intellectual disability claims because they failed to raise timely intellectual disability claims under Atkins. See Harvey v. State, 260 So. 3d 906, 907 (Fla. 2018) ("Harvey, who had never before raised an intellectual disability claim, argues that his claim was timely because he filed two months after this Court decided Walls v. State, 213 So. 3d 340 (Fla. 2016). We have previously held that a similarly situated defendant's claim was untimely because he failed to raise a timely intellectual disability claim under Atkins[.]"); Blanco v. State, 249 So. 3d 536, 537 (Fla. 2018) ("We conclude that Blanco's intellectual disability claim is foreclosed by the reasoning of this Court's decision in Rodriguez [v. State, 250 So. 3d 616 (Fla. 2016)]. In Rodriguez, this Court applied the time-bar contained within [Florida Rule of Criminal Procedure] 3.203 to a defendant who sought to raise an intellectual disability claim under Atkins for the first time in light of Hall."); Rodriguez, 250 So. 3d at 616 ("Rodriguez, who had never before raised an intellectual disability claim, asserted that there was 'good cause' pursuant to [Florida Rule of Criminal Procedure] 3.203(f) for his failure to assert a previous claim of intellectual disability [because] only after the United States Supreme Court decided [Hall] did he have the basis for asserting an intellectual disability

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claim. The trial court rejected [and this Court affirmed] the motion as time barred, concluding there was no reason that Rodriguez could not have previously raised a claim of intellectual disability based on Atkins[.]").

Bowles waited until October 19, 2017 to raise an intellectual disability claim for the first time. Therefore, the record conclusively shows that Bowles' intellectual disability claim is untimely...