Florida Supreme Court Orders New Trial for Henry Lee Jones in 2003 Melbourne Motel Murder
A 5-2 ruling finds prosecutors withheld state crime-lab records on key DNA evidence; Jones still faces two death sentences in Tennessee for a 2003 double murder.
Published
The Florida Supreme Court on October 15, 2026, threw out Henry Lee Jones's conviction and death sentence for the 2003 murder of 19-year-old Carlos Perez in Melbourne and sent the case back to Brevard County for a new trial. The court found that the State had kept from the defense crime-lab records that cut against a central piece of its case.
The vote was 5-2. Chief Justice Couriel wrote for the majority, joined by Justices Labarga, Muñiz, Grosshans and Francis; Justice Barrios dissented, joined by Justice Tanenbaum. The ruling does not decide whether Jones is guilty. It sets the conviction aside and orders the case tried again.
The records concerned DNA from a woman that was found on Perez's body. She testified that she had never met him. At trial, witnesses said the DNA could have reached him from an unwashed motel comforter, and prosecutors leaned on that explanation in closing. But in 2012, analysts at the Florida Department of Law Enforcement had told the lead detective that such a transfer was "highly unlikely" and that the sample was "more than likely a direct contact of some sort." Those call logs never reached the defense, and the court found that withholding them impaired Jones's case.
Perez was found dead in a Melbourne motel room on August 27, 2003. He had been strangled and stabbed repeatedly in the neck. Prosecutors argued that Jones befriended him, tied him up, sexually assaulted him and killed him. A Brevard County jury convicted Jones in October 2013, deliberating for 28 minutes before recommending death, and Circuit Judge John M. Griesbaum imposed the death sentence in May 2014.
The Florida case was never the only one. Days before Perez died, on August 23, 2003, Clarence James, 82, and his wife, Lillian, 67, were killed in their home in Bartlett, Tennessee. A Shelby County jury convicted Jones of their murders in 2009, and he faces two death sentences there; the Florida ruling does not touch those convictions. At the Florida trial, prosecutors pointed to the Tennessee killings and to the September 2002 death of Keith Gross, 24, found bound and strangled with his throat cut in his Fort Lauderdale home, as killings carried out the same way. Jones was the prime suspect in the Gross case but has never been charged.
As of October 17, no decision on whether Brevard County prosecutors will try Jones again had been reported.