Frances v. State
| Citation | 970 So.2d 806 |
| Decision Date | 11 October 2007 |
| Docket Number | No. SC05-892.,SC05-892. |
| Parties | David Sylvester FRANCES, Appellant, v. STATE of Florida, Appellee. |
| Court | United States State Supreme Court of Florida |
James S. Purdy, Public Defender, and James R. Wulchak, Chief, Appellate Division, Assistant Public Defender, Seventh Judicial Circuit, Daytona Beach, FL, for Appellant.
Bill McCollum, Attorney General, Tallahassee, FL, and Barbara C. Davis, Assistant Attorney General, Daytona Beach, FL, for Appellee.
This case is before the Court on appeal from a judgment of conviction of first-degree murder and a sentence of death. We have jurisdiction. See art. V, § 3(b)(1), Fla. Const. For the reasons explained below, we affirm both the conviction and sentence.
David Sylvester Frances and his younger brother Elvis Frances were charged by indictment with the first-degree murders of Helena Mills and JoAnna Charles, the robbery of Mills' automobile, and two counts of the petit theft of Charles' jewelry and a Playstation video game system belonging to Mills' son.
Gleneth Byron, the mother of the Frances brothers, was a close friend of Mills and lived about five minutes from Mills' condominium in Orlando. The two families often socialized together. The Frances brothers had been living with Byron for about a month and neither was employed. Byron asked the brothers to move out and planned to give them money for bus tickets to Tallahassee, where the family had lived previously. David Frances called Byron around noon on November 6, 2000, to tell her that the brothers had a ride to Tallahassee. When Byron returned home at 5 p.m., her sons and all of their belongings were gone.
Early that same morning, the Frances brothers rang the doorbell at Mills' condominium. Mills' thirteen-year-old son Dwayne Rivers answered the door and talked to the brothers briefly for a minute or two. Rivers knew the brothers from when they all had lived in the Virgin Islands. Rivers told the brothers that JoAnna Charles, who was a sixteen-year-old family friend living with Mills, was staying home from school that day because she was sick. The brothers departed and Rivers left for school at 8:45 a.m. When Rivers returned home at 6 p.m., he saw Charles' red Toyota in front of the condominium, but he did not see his mother's green Mazda 626 in the garage. Rivers called for Charles and banged on the locked door of the master bedroom, but did not receive a response. When Rivers entered the master bedroom through a sliding glass door on the balcony, he discovered the bodies of his mother and Charles on the floor of the bathroom. Rivers phoned Byron and then called 911.
When the paramedics arrived, they discovered Charles' body on top of Mills' body. Both women had been strangled with an electric cord. A cord was still wrapped around Charles' neck. The bodies were in rigor mortis. There were no signs of forced entry into the condominium. The medical examiner testified that Mills had multiple recent abrasions to her face, injuries to her neck, ruptured blood vessels in her face, and a cut across her neck caused by the cord being wrapped around her neck and pulled at each end. Charles had a groove around her neck with superficial lacerations. She also had crescent-shaped fingernail marks on her right neck caused by her attempts to remove either the ligature or hands from her neck. The material under Charles' nails matched her own DNA. Material removed from Mills' nails was identified as male DNA. While neither David nor Elvis could be excluded as the contributor of the material found under Mills' nails, the sample was so limited that this finding was not significant. The electrical cord around Charles' neck was tested for latent fingerprints, but there were not enough ridgelines on the latent prints to enable a match. No DNA testing was conducted on the electrical cord because the chemicals used for the latent print testing would have destroyed the DNA. Conversely, had the cord been tested for DNA, it would have obliterated any latent prints.
The tag number and information about Mills' stolen vehicle were entered into the national law enforcement data base. On December 5, 2000, the Frances brothers and three other individuals were stopped in Mills' vehicle in DeKalb County, Georgia. Elvis was driving the vehicle and David was a passenger in the back seat. The vehicle still bore Mills' license plate. David claimed that he had bought the vehicle in Tallahassee, but was unable to name the seller.
Orlando police detectives traveled to Georgia to interview the brothers. Twenty-year-old David gave a statement after being advised of his Miranda1 rights and waiving them. In this statement, David originally denied any knowledge of the murders, claimed that he and Elvis took a bus from Orlando to Tallahassee, and stated that he had bought Mills' car from someone named "Will" in Tallahassee. David subsequently admitted being at Mills' house on the morning of the murders and stated that Elvis killed both victims. David admitted that he helped Elvis move the bodies and participated in stealing Mills' car. David also admitted that the brothers took Mills' car and drove it to Tallahassee.
The officers then interviewed sixteen-year-old Elvis at the juvenile detention facility where he was being held. The officers played David's taped interview for Elvis. Elvis related a different version of events, claiming that David also participated in the murders. The brothers were arrested for first-degree murder and transported back to Florida. An attempt to record their conversations in the transport van was unsuccessful because the equipment did not work.
David was interviewed a second time on December 6. During this interview, David related the following additional details about the murders. Byron wanted the brothers out of her house, but they had no money and no place to go. After talking to Rivers on Monday morning, the brothers decided to steal Mills' car. They went back to Mills' house where they met her in her garden. Mills told the brothers to go inside. When she came in, both brothers jumped her. David strangled Mills with his hands until she passed out. Elvis attempted to do the same to Charles, but had difficulty because Charles struggled with him. Both brothers moved the women into the bedroom and David then strangled Mills with an electric cord. Because Charles "still had life in her," the brothers wrapped the electric cord around her neck and each pulled on an end in order to kill her. They took jewelry and a Playstation from the house and drove off in Mills' car. They pawned the stolen items for $240. They drove to Tallahassee and then to Georgia in Mills' car. Both of David's taped interviews were published to the jury at trial.
Mills' vehicle was sealed and returned to Orlando in a sealed car trailer. David's prints were lifted from the rear passenger window of the vehicle. The owner of the pawn shop identified receipts showing that the items from Mills' house were pawned at 11:32 a.m. on the morning of the murders. David presented his driver's license to pawn a PlayStation, a pendant, and three chains. Rivers was able to identify the pawned items as belonging to his mother and Charles. The thumbprint on the pawn ticket belonged to David Frances. Rivers was also able to recognize his mother's car keys based on a small blue flashlight with her employer's logo that was on the key ring.
David filed a pretrial motion challenging the legality of Florida's death penalty under Ring v. Arizona, 536 U.S. 584, 122 S.Ct. 2428, 153 L.Ed.2d 556 (2002), based on the facts that the judge rather than the jury imposes sentence, jury unanimity is not required as to the sentence recommendation, and the role of the jury is allegedly minimized by the standard jury instructions. David also moved to bar victim impact evidence from the penalty phase, arguing that such evidence is irrelevant to any statutory aggravating circumstance and thus is unconstitutional. The trial court denied both motions.
The jury trial commenced on October 25, 2004, in the circuit court in Orange County. At the close of the State's case, David moved for a judgment of acquittal, arguing that premeditation had not been shown. The trial court denied the motion. The jury returned guilty verdicts on all of the charges.
At the penalty phase, the State presented victim impact testimony from Mills' son and Charles' mother and additional testimony from the medical examiner about the physical effects of asphyxiation. The defense presented the testimony of nine witnesses a psychotherapist and mitigation specialist who met and interviewed David and a number of people who knew him during his childhood; family members, friends, and former teachers and coaches; David's corrections officer; and Dr. Eric Mings, the psychologist who evaluated David's mental health status. All of the family members and friends testified that David was a quiet, respectful child and young man, but Elvis was aggressive and violent. They also testified that David tried to keep Elvis out of fights and trouble. Prison inmate Tameka Jones2 testified about the murder of Monique Washington in Tallahassee in September 2000. Jones, who had been a roommate of the brothers in Tallahassee, went with Elvis to Washington's apartment, ostensibly to help Washington move her belongings. Instead, Elvis strangled Washington with his hands and an electric cord in order to steal her car. Jones also stated that David helped Elvis dispose of Washington's body after the fact. Dr. Mings testified that David has average intelligence and had developed a pathologically dependent relationship with Elvis at an early age.
The jury recommended that David be sentenced to death for Mills' murder by a vote of nine to three and for Charles' murder by a vote of ten to two. Additional live and videotaped mitigating evidence was presented to the court during t...
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