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Date: 01-24-2021
Case Style:
Duane Eugene Owen v. State of Florida
Case Number: SC18-810
Judge: Supreme Court of Florida
Court: PER CURIAM.
Plaintiff's Attorney: Ashley Moody, Attorney General, Tallahassee, Florida, and Celia A. Terenzio,
Assistant Attorney General, Palm Beach, Florida
Defendant's Attorney:
OR
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Description:
Tallahassee, FL - Criminal defense attorney represented Duane Eugene Owen with appealing an order of the circuit court denying his successive motion to vacate his sentence of death.
In 1984, Owen forcibly entered a home in which fourteen-year-old Karen
Slattery was babysitting two young children, stabbed Slattery to death, and
sexually assaulted her. Owen v. State (Owen II), 862 So. 2d 687, 700 (Fla. 2003),
cert. denied, 543 U.S. 986 (2004).
1
Owen was sentenced to death after his jury
recommended this sentence by a vote of ten to two. Id. at 690.
Owen has also been convicted of the first-degree murder of another victim,
Georgianna Worden, who was murdered approximately two months after Slattery
in a scenario “substantially similar to [that] of the Slattery murder.” Id. at 691-92;
Owen v. State (Owen I), 560 So. 2d 207, 209 (Fla. 1990). Owen was sentenced to
death for Worden’s murder following his jury’s ten-to-two recommendation for
death. See Owen v. State, 596 So. 2d 985, 987 (Fla. 1992), cert. denied, 506 U.S.
921 (1992). With respect to this murder, too, Owen has sought relief under Hurst
v. Florida and Hurst v. State. Owen v. State, 247 So. 3d 394, 395 (Fla. 2018).
However, we have already held that Owen is not entitled to Hurst relief from his
1. For the sexual offense, Owen was not convicted of sexual battery, but
attempted sexual battery. Owen II, 862 So. 2d at 690. Although there was clear
evidence of a sexual assault, it was not clear whether it occurred before or after
Slattery’s death. Id. at 699.
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sentence for the Worden murder because that sentence became final before June
24, 2002, the cut-off date for such relief that was established in Asay v. State, 210
So. 3d 1, 22 (Fla. 2016), and Mosley v. State, 209 So. 3d 1248, 1283 (Fla. 2016).
See Owen, 247 So. 3d at 395.
Even though Owen murdered Slattery before he murdered Worden, his death
sentence for the murder of Slattery is in a different posture with respect to our
Hurst-related precedent. The reason for this difference is that Owen’s original
conviction and sentence of death for Slattery’s murder were reversed and
remanded for a new trial, see Owen I, 560 So. 2d at 212, which delayed the finality
date of his conviction and sentence for that murder. Although Owen was
convicted of the Slattery murder again and given the same sentence, the new
conviction and sentence for Slattery’s murder did not become final until after June
24, 2002, more than a decade after Owen’s conviction and sentence of death for
Worden’s murder became final. See Owen II, 862 So. 2d at 700, cert. denied, 543
U.S. 986 (2004).
With respect to the Slattery murder and the resulting sentence, which is at
issue in this case, Owen, whose DNA was found in semen recovered from
Slattery’s body, confessed to his crimes. Id. at 702. More specifically, Owen
admitted the following facts:
Owen admitted to cutting a screen out of a window to gain access to
the home where Slattery was babysitting. The first time he entered
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the home, he heard noises and observed Slattery fixing the hair of one
of her charges. Owen left the home but subsequently returned.
Initially, when he returned, he had his socks on his hands, but
immediately upon entering the house, he searched a closet in the home
and found gloves, which he placed on his hands, returning his socks to
his feet. He also retrieved a hammer from the same closet.
According to Owen, he confronted Slattery near the phone as
she was concluding a telephone conversation. He ordered her to
return the phone to its cradle, and when she did not, he dropped his
hammer, grabbed the phone from her hand, returned it to its base, and
immediately began stabbing her. After Owen had stabbed Slattery, he
checked on the children to ensure they had not awakened during the
attack, and he then proceeded to lock the doors and turn off all the
lights and the television. Owen then dragged Slattery by her feet into
the bedroom, removed her clothes, and sexually assaulted her. He
explained to the officer questioning him that he had only worn a pair
of “short-shorts” into the house. After he sexually assaulted Slattery,
Owen showered to wash the blood from his body, and then exited the
house through a sliding glass door. He then returned to the home
where he was staying and turned the clocks back [in that house] to
read 9:00 p.m. According to Owen, he did this to provide an alibi
based on time. He admitted that after he turned the clocks back, he
purposely asked his roommate the time. Owen bragged to the officers
about his plan to turn back the clocks, explaining that he “had to be
thinking.”
Id. at 700.
Along with first-degree murder, Owen was convicted of attempted sexual
battery and burglary at his retrial. Id. at 690. After this Court affirmed Owen’s
convictions and sentence of death on direct appeal, id., and the United States
Supreme Court denied certiorari, Owen v. Florida, 543 U.S. 986 (2004), this Court
affirmed the denial of Owen’s initial postconviction motion and denied his petition
for writ of habeas corpus. Owen v. State (Owen III), 986 So. 2d 534, 541 (Fla.
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2008). The federal district court subsequently denied Owen’s federal habeas
petition, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed, and the Supreme Court
denied certiorari. See Owen v. Fla. Dep’t of Corr., 686 F.3d 1181, 1183 (11th Cir.
2012), cert. denied, 569 U.S. 960 (2013). In the successive postconviction motion
at issue in this appeal, Owen sought relief from his death sentence pursuant to the
Supreme Court’s decision in Hurst v. Florida and this Court’s decision on remand
in Hurst v. State. The circuit court denied relief, and Owen seeks reversal of that
ruling.
ANALYSIS
In Hurst v. Florida, the Supreme Court found Florida’s capital sentencing
scheme unconstitutional because it “required the judge alone to find the existence
of an aggravating circumstance.” 136 S. Ct. at 624. In so holding, the Supreme
Court overruled its prior precedent upholding Florida’s capital sentencing scheme
“to the extent [that precedent] allow[ed] a sentencing judge to find an aggravating
circumstance, independent of a jury’s factfinding, that is necessary for the
imposition of the death penalty.” Id. Then, in Hurst v. State, this Court held the
following:
[B]efore the trial judge may consider imposing a sentence of death,
the jury in a capital case must unanimously and expressly find all the
aggravating factors that were proven beyond a reasonable doubt,
unanimously find that the aggravating factors are sufficient to impose
death, unanimously find that the aggravating factors outweigh the
mitigating factors, and unanimously recommend a sentence of death.
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202 So. 3d at 57. We have since receded from this holding, “except to the extent it
requires a jury unanimously to find the existence of a statutory aggravating
circumstance beyond a reasonable doubt.” Poole, 45 Fla. L. Weekly at S48. The
Supreme Court’s recent decision in McKinney confirms that we correctly
interpreted Hurst v. Florida in Poole and supports our decision to recede from the
additional requirements imposed by Hurst v. State.
2
McKinney, 140 S. Ct. at 7073
(“Under Ring [v. Arizona, 536 U.S. 584 (2002),] and Hurst [v. Florida], a jury
must find the aggravating circumstance that makes the defendant death eligible.
But importantly, in a capital sentencing proceeding just as in an ordinary
sentencing proceeding, a jury (as opposed to a judge) is not constitutionally
required to weigh the aggravating and mitigating circumstances or to make the
ultimate sentencing decision within the relevant sentencing range.”).
Beyond the requirement that a jury unanimously find the existence of an
aggravating circumstance beyond a reasonable doubt, as explained in Poole, the
2. The foundation underpinning Hurst v. State was an erroneous reading of
Hurst v. Florida as imposing a constitutional requirement for unanimous jury
“findings” on sentencing factors beyond the existence of at least one aggravating
circumstance. See Hurst v. State, 202 So. 3d at 44 (“[W]e hold that the Supreme
Court’s decision in Hurst v. Florida requires that all the critical findings necessary
before the trial court may consider imposing a sentence of death must be found
unanimously by the jury.”). McKinney confirms that our prior decision in Hurst v.
State was erroneously grounded on a fundamental misunderstanding of Hurst v.
Florida, as we held in Poole.
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holding of Hurst v. State is not supported by state or federal constitutional law or
the statutory law that was in effect before its issuance. Poole, 45 Fla. L. Weekly at
S43-48; accord McKinney, 140 S. Ct. at 707-8. In contrast, the requirement that a
jury, not the judge, find the existence of an aggravating circumstance is mandated
by the Supreme Court’s decision in Hurst v. Florida, 136 S. Ct. at 624, as a Sixth
Amendment requirement. McKinney, 140 S. Ct. at 707; Poole, 45 Fla. L. Weekly
at S44-47.
The Sixth Amendment test required by Hurst v. Florida, 136 S. Ct. at 624,
and applied in Poole, 45 Fla. L. Weekly at S47-S48, is easily met in Owen’s case
because unanimous jury findings did support two of the aggravators in Owen’s
case (prior violent felony and in the course of a burglary) and would preclude a
finding of Hurst v. Florida error. See Hurst v. Florida, 136 S. Ct. at 624 (finding
that Florida’s sentencing scheme violated the Sixth Amendment because it
“required the judge alone to find the existence of an aggravating circumstance”);
Poole, 45 Fla. L. Weekly at S48. Specifically, the prior-violent-felony aggravator
was established by Owen’s convictions, after a jury trial, of the first-degree murder
and sexual battery of Worden. Owen III, 986 So. 2d at 553, 555; Owen, 596 So. 2d
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at 986-87 (Worden case).
3 The “in the course of a burglary” aggravator was
established by the jury’s verdict of guilt as to that offense in this case. Owen II,
862 So. 2d at 690. In fact, Owen conceded the existence of both of these
aggravators at sentencing. Id. at 702
Outcome: Because Owen’s jury found that he committed first-degree murder and
because jury findings establish the existence of two statutory aggravators, he is
eligible for the death penalty under the law in effect at the time of his crime, and
there is no constitutional infirmity in his sentence under Hurst v. Florida or the
portion of the Hurst v. State holding that remains after our decision in Poole.
Accordingly, we affirm the order of the circuit court upholding the death sentence
imposed in this case.
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