John Evander Couey was convicted in Florida in 2007 of the first-degree murder of Jessica Lunsford, a child from Homosassa, in Citrus County, who died in February 2005. The case drew national attention within weeks, and before it ever reached a courtroom the Florida Legislature had passed, without a single vote against it in either chamber, a statute bearing her name. It took two years, three counties and nearly three hundred prospective jurors to bring Couey to trial. On March 7, 2007, a Miami jury returned guilty verdicts on every count. A week later it recommended death by a vote of 10 to 2, and on August 24, 2007, a circuit judge sitting in Inverness imposed the sentence.
He did not live to see the Florida Supreme Court review it. Couey died in state custody in Jacksonville on September 30, 2009, at the age of 51, a little over a month before the court was due to hear his automatic appeal. No appellate court ever ruled on the conviction or the sentence, so the judgment of the trial court was never finally tested.
Jessica Lunsford lived in Homosassa, a community in Citrus County on Florida's Gulf coast. She died in February 2005. She was the only victim named in the charges. Her father went on to lead the campaign for the Florida law that carries her name, and he continued afterward to press for tougher laws on offenders against children.
The Citrus County Sheriff's Office opened its inquiry on February 24, 2005, and it remained the lead agency throughout. In the days that followed, detectives worked through the people living in the area who were under state supervision for earlier offenses, and among them was Couey. Five days into the inquiry they tried to reach him and could not. They spoke with members of his family, who could not produce him, and his name moved up the list of people the sheriff's office wanted to question. He had left Florida without telling his probation officials, as the terms of his supervision required him to do.
He surfaced in Georgia. At the request of the Citrus County sheriff, Savannah-Chatham police picked him up in Savannah on Saturday, March 12, 2005, and questioned him for about two hours. He denied any involvement and said he had gone to Georgia to look for work. With no charge to hold him on, they let him go. When Citrus County asked for a second interview the following Monday, he could not be found.
The next days changed the case. Deputies returned to Homosassa, and the sheriff's office said that evidence gathered there tied him to the crime. Florida issued two warrants against him, one for violating his probation and one for failing to report that he had moved, and on Thursday, March 15, 2005, the sheriff publicly named him a person of interest. Deputies of the Richmond County Sheriff's Office arrested him in Augusta, Georgia, on March 17, 2005, three weeks after the inquiry began. At that point he was held only on the Florida warrants, and he had not been charged with any offense connected to the child. He was 46 years old.
Two Citrus County detectives traveled to Augusta and questioned him on March 18. The interview was recorded. During it he spoke of wanting a lawyer, and the questioning continued. That recording, and what it led to, would become the central legal dispute of the next two years.
Couey was returned to Florida, and on March 21, 2005, he was charged in Citrus County with first-degree murder, kidnapping, burglary and a further offense against a child. Prosecutors sought the death penalty. He pleaded not guilty to the murder charge in early April 2005, and on July 21 of that year a trial date of February 6, 2006, was set in the Citrus County circuit court.
That date did not hold. The case was in pretrial litigation for most of the next eighteen months, over two questions that would decide how, where and on what evidence it could be tried: whether the Augusta interview could be put before a jury, and whether a jury could be found anywhere near Citrus County that had not already formed a view.
Couey's lawyers moved to suppress the recorded statement from Augusta, along with everything investigators had learned because of it. At the suppression hearing the two detectives testified that his request for a lawyer had come immediately after a lie-detector test was raised, and that they had been unsure whether he wanted counsel at once or only before such a test. They kept questioning him after he said he would talk about some things. The defense presented the detectives as investigators who had pressed past a clear request.
On Friday, June 30, 2006, the circuit judge ruled for the defense on the statement itself. Couey had asked for a lawyer during the interview and had never been given the chance to consult one, and the court held that the confession could not be used at trial. The judge described what had happened as a material and profound violation of one of the most basic principles of criminal law, the rule that questioning must stop once a suspect asks for counsel.
The ruling did not end the prosecution's case. The defense had also asked the court to exclude the evidence investigators found after the interview, on the ground that the statement had led them to it. The prosecution answered that investigators would have reached the same evidence lawfully in any event, because what deputies had already gathered with consent would on its own have supported a warrant. The judge accepted that argument, and the physical evidence stayed in the case. In other pretrial rulings, the court allowed prosecutors to use statements Couey made later, while in custody, to investigators and to a jail guard.
The result shaped the trial that followed. The jury would never hear the Augusta recording. It would hear instead from the people who had kept Couey in custody and from the investigators who had worked the case.
The second question proved harder. On April 21, 2006, the circuit judge ordered that the jury be chosen outside Citrus County because of the volume of local coverage. The plan was to select jurors in Lake County and bring them back to Citrus County to hear the evidence. Jury selection began in Tavares, the Lake County seat, on Monday, July 10, 2006.
It lasted three days. Lawyers on both sides spent that time removing prospective jurors who had seen news reports, and the recorded confession, though ruled inadmissible, had already been widely broadcast and printed along with much else about the case. On July 13, 2006, the judge halted jury selection, concluding that an impartial panel could not be found in the area, and ruled that the case had to move farther from Citrus County.
On September 12, 2006, it was announced that the jury would be drawn from Miami-Dade County, at the other end of the state, with selection tentatively set for February 12, 2007. This time the trial itself would move as well. The defense asked the court to move it again, out of Miami, and on November 8, 2006, that motion was denied. Couey was brought to Miami on February 9, 2007, nearly two years after his arrest. He was 48.
Jury selection began on Monday, February 12, 2007. The defense asked for a further delay, and the judge refused it, saying the case was going forward. He questioned each prospective juror about what he or she already knew. News organizations covering the trial were barred from showing jurors' faces or reporting their names, and the jury, once chosen, was to be kept apart from outside contact for the length of the trial.
Even in Miami many prospective jurors arrived knowing a great deal about the case. Selection, expected to take most of a week, ran for twelve days. The court interviewed 288 people before a jury was seated on February 28, 2007. Testimony opened the next day, March 1.
The prosecution built its case on the physical evidence that had survived the suppression ruling and on the testimony of jail guards and investigators. Those witnesses told the jury that, after his arrest, Couey had talked about the crime with them repeatedly. In those statements he said he had not meant to kill the child.
The defense called a psychologist, who testified that Couey showed signs of mental illness and of intellectual disability. That evidence was offered as mitigation, looking ahead to the stage that would follow a conviction, where a defendant's mental condition can weigh against a death sentence.
On Wednesday, March 7, 2007, after about four hours of deliberation, the jury found Couey guilty of first-degree murder and of each of the other three charges: kidnapping, burglary and the further offense against a child.
Under the Florida capital sentencing law then in force, a conviction for first-degree murder led to a separate penalty hearing before the same jury. The jury heard further evidence and then made an advisory recommendation between death and life in prison. The recommendation did not bind the judge, who made the final decision, but Florida courts gave it substantial weight.
The penalty phase opened in Miami on Tuesday, March 13, 2007. The defense case at this stage centered on Couey's mental state and his capacity. The jury deliberated for about 75 minutes and, a week after the verdict, recommended death by a vote of 10 to 2.
One question remained before the judge could sentence. In Atkins v. Virginia, decided in 2002, the United States Supreme Court held that the Constitution bars the execution of people with intellectual disability. Couey's lawyers argued that he fell within that protection, and the question went to the circuit judge in Citrus County, who had the final word on sentence. The measured IQ at the center of the dispute was 78, slightly above the level generally treated as indicating intellectual disability.
In early August 2007 the judge rejected the claim in a strongly worded ruling, which left Couey eligible to be sentenced to death. Sentencing was set for August 24.
On Friday, August 24, 2007, in the circuit courtroom in Inverness, the judge followed the jury's recommendation. Before pronouncing sentence he read a detailed history of the case for nearly an hour, setting out the evidence on which the verdicts rested. He then sentenced Couey to death. The victim's father was in the courtroom.
The sentence ended the trial court's work. Under Florida law every death sentence goes to the Florida Supreme Court on an automatic appeal.
The automatic appeal placed the whole of the trial court's work before the Florida Supreme Court for the first time. The rulings that had shaped the case, from the June 2006 decision on the Augusta statement and the admission of the evidence found afterward to the move to Miami and the rejection of the intellectual-disability claim, had never been reviewed by a higher court. The appeal was pending through 2008 and 2009, and the court scheduled it to be heard in the autumn of 2009.
Couey spent his last two years on Florida's death row. He died in Jacksonville on Wednesday, September 30, 2009, aged 51. A spokeswoman for the Florida Department of Corrections said that he had died of natural causes. She gave no further detail.
His appeal had been due to be argued a little over a month later. With his death the appeal could not go forward, and the Florida Supreme Court never issued a ruling in the case. The death sentence was never carried out, and the conviction was never reviewed.
The statute that carries the victim's name began in the Florida House of Representatives in the spring of 2005, while the criminal case was in its first weeks. House Bill 1877 was filed by the House Criminal Justice Committee and moved quickly. After favorable votes in the Justice Appropriations Committee on April 12 and the Justice Council on April 14, the House passed it 118 to 0 on April 19. The Senate passed an amended version 40 to 0 on April 21, and the House concurred the next day, 115 to 0. The governor signed it on May 2, 2005. It became Chapter 2005-28, Laws of Florida, and took effect on September 1, 2005, with an appropriation of nearly $12 million.
The committee version that reached the House floor already carried the core of the law. A House staff analysis dated April 15, 2005, described it as requiring the Department of Corrections to place offenders on supervision for specified sexual offenses, and designated sexual predators, on electronic monitoring of a set type, with lifetime monitoring for those who met certain criteria. It removed two limits on who could be designated a sexual predator: the rule that the earlier offense had to have been sentenced separately from the latest one, and the rule that a prior felony did not count if it was more than ten years old. It made it a third-degree felony to let an offender live with you knowing that he had not complied with the reporting rules. The Department of Corrections put the cost at $2.5 million in the first year, rising to $6.9 million in the second and $13.4 million in the third, and the bill directed the state's Criminal Justice Estimating Conference to begin tracking how many offenders the monitoring requirements would reach.
The act rewrote much of the state's law on sexual offenders and predators. It required them to report in person to the sheriff's office of their county of residence twice a year and made a failure to do so a third-degree felony. It created new crimes for failing to respond to address verification, for helping an offender evade law enforcement or giving false information about one, and for knowingly harboring an offender who had not complied with the reporting rules, and it made tampering with court-ordered monitoring equipment a crime. It required electronic monitoring for certain offenders on probation, community control or conditional release, with lifetime monitoring for some, and it lengthened from 20 to 30 years the period before a designated sexual predator could petition to have the designation removed.
It also changed sentencing. For adults convicted of the most serious offenses of that kind against a child under 12, it created a life felony carrying a mandatory minimum of 25 years in prison, followed, where a life sentence was not imposed, by probation with lifetime electronic monitoring. It added to the list of aggravating circumstances in Florida capital cases that the crime was committed by a person designated a sexual predator. It required a court finding on the danger a registered offender posed before release on bail, required public and private misdemeanor probation services to check every probationer against the state's sexual offender registry, and it required background screening of contractors allowed on school grounds when students are present. For offenders on conditional release after a crime committed on or after September 1, 2005, against a victim 15 or younger, electronic monitoring became mandatory rather than a matter for the supervising officer's discretion. In the years that followed, legislatures in many other states took up bills modeled on it.
Couey contested the case from arraignment to verdict, pleading not guilty to the murder charge. The confession investigators took in Augusta was ruled inadmissible and was never heard by the jury, which convicted on the physical evidence and his later statements in custody. At the penalty stage his defense rested on his mental condition, and the trial judge rejected the claim that he was intellectually disabled and so ineligible for execution. The jury's recommendation was not unanimous: two of the twelve jurors voted for life in prison, a division Florida law then allowed. None of those rulings, nor the verdicts, was reviewed by an appellate court, because the Florida Supreme Court did not decide his direct appeal before he died.
February 2005: Jessica Lunsford dies in Homosassa, Citrus County, Florida.
February 24, 2005: The Citrus County Sheriff's Office opens its inquiry.
March 12, 2005: Couey is questioned in Savannah, Georgia, at Citrus County's request, and released.
March 15, 2005: The sheriff names him a person of interest.
March 17, 2005: Couey is arrested in Augusta, Georgia, on Florida probation warrants.
March 18, 2005: Citrus County detectives question him in Augusta.
March 21, 2005: He is charged with first-degree murder and other charges.
Early April 2005: He pleads not guilty to murder.
April 19 to 22, 2005: The Florida House and Senate pass the Jessica Lunsford Act unanimously.
May 2, 2005: The governor signs the act.
July 21, 2005: A trial date of February 6, 2006, is set.
September 1, 2005: The Jessica Lunsford Act takes effect.
April 21, 2006: Jury selection is ordered moved out of Citrus County.
June 30, 2006: The circuit court suppresses the Augusta confession.
July 10, 2006: Jury selection begins in Tavares, Lake County.
July 13, 2006: Jury selection is halted and the trial ordered moved farther away.
September 12, 2006: Miami-Dade County is announced as the venue.
November 8, 2006: A defense motion to move the trial out of Miami is denied.
February 9, 2007: Couey is brought to Miami.
February 12, 2007: Jury selection begins in Miami.
February 28, 2007: A jury is seated after 288 people are interviewed.
March 1, 2007: Testimony begins.
March 7, 2007: Guilty verdicts on all counts.
March 13, 2007: The penalty phase opens.
March 2007: The jury recommends death by a vote of 10 to 2.
Early August 2007: The court rejects the intellectual-disability claim.
August 24, 2007: Death sentence imposed in Inverness.
September 30, 2009: Couey dies in Jacksonville, before his automatic appeal is heard.