On November 25, 1996, Richard Wendorf and Naoma Queen died in Eustis, in Lake County, Florida, about 30 miles northwest of Orlando. Within three days a group of young people from western Kentucky had been arrested in Louisiana, and within a week the first of them was in a Florida courtroom. The one who drew the most attention, then and for decades afterward, was Roderrick Justin Ferrell, known as Rod, who was 16 at the time of the crimes. In February 1998 he pleaded guilty to two counts of first-degree murder and to two further felony counts arising from the same night, one of burglary and one of robbery, and later that month a circuit judge in Lake County sentenced him to death.
The sentence did not hold. In 1999 the Supreme Court of Florida decided that a death sentence imposed on a defendant who had been sixteen at the time of his offense was cruel or unusual punishment under the state's constitution, and in November 2000 it applied that ruling to Ferrell, affirming his convictions and reducing both sentences to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. That might have been the end of it. Instead, a run of decisions over the next sixteen years, in Washington and in Tallahassee, reopened the question of what a state may do with a person who killed before his eighteenth birthday. Ferrell was turned away once, in 2013, by a Florida appellate court that would not apply the new federal rule to old cases. By 2019, with the law settled the other way, he sat again in a Lake County courtroom, more than two decades after his plea, asking a judge to reduce the sentence he had served since his teens.
Ferrell came from Murray, Kentucky. He had also lived for a time in Eustis, and he had moved back to Kentucky before the events of November 1996.
In late November 1996 Ferrell and three others from Murray traveled from Kentucky to Lake County. The two victims were killed in Eustis on the night of November 25, the Monday of Thanksgiving week. Both counts of first-degree murder that Ferrell later admitted rest on that night, as do the burglary and robbery counts that were charged with them.
By the time the deaths were discovered, the group had left Florida.
The case moved quickly. The break came from Kentucky, and on Thanksgiving night, November 28, 1996, three days after the deaths, officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, took five people into custody.
Four of the five were juveniles. The fifth was the only adult, and her case moved first. She was brought back to Florida on Tuesday, December 3, 1996, to face murder charges. The next day she appeared by video from the Lake County jail before a judge in Tavares, the county seat, and was denied bond. No court date was set.
Ferrell and the three other teenagers remained in Louisiana for the moment, awaiting extradition. When they were returned, Ferrell's case went to the circuit court in Lake County, and the state sought the death penalty.
In February 1998, as his trial was due to begin, Ferrell pleaded guilty to every count: one count of burglary and one of robbery, each in its aggravated form, and two counts of first-degree murder, one for each death. He told the court as he entered his plea that some of the people arrested with him were innocent.
Ferrell's mental state was the ground of his defense, but guilt itself he did not contest. The plea removed guilt from the case and left the hardest question open. The question of sentence went to a jury in Tavares for a recommendation, and at the close of the penalty phase the jury recommended death. Each of the other four was prosecuted separately.
On Friday morning, February 27, 1998, the circuit judge followed the jury's recommendation and imposed two sentences of death, one for each murder. He was, at that moment, the youngest person under a death sentence in the United States, and he was the first of the five to be sentenced.
The appeal went to the Supreme Court of Florida. Ferrell's case went up as No. SC93127, under the court's jurisdiction over capital appeals in Article V, section 3(b)(1), of the Florida Constitution. The Public Defender for the Seventh Judicial Circuit took the appeal, and the Attorney General's office answered for the state, which filed a cross-appeal of its own. The Rutherford Institute appeared as a friend of the court.
By the time the court reached Ferrell's appeal, the law had changed beneath it. In Brennan v. State, decided in 1999, the Supreme Court of Florida concluded, in its own words, that "the imposition of a death sentence on a sixteen-year-old defendant constitutes cruel or unusual punishment in violation of article I, section 17 of the Florida Constitution." The holding rested on the Florida Constitution alone.
Ferrell's case was decided on November 9, 2000. The opinion, issued per curiam, was brief. It recited that Ferrell had pleaded guilty to one burglary count, one robbery count and "two counts of first-degree murder for the 1996 murders" of the two victims, that he had been sixteen at the time, and that the trial court had sentenced him to death for the murders. The state had asked the court to revisit Brennan. The court refused in a single-sentence footnote: "We reject the State's argument and invitation to revisit this decision."
The disposition followed: "Accordingly, we affirm Ferrell's convictions, vacate his death sentences, and reduce the sentences to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole." Six justices concurred. The chief justice dissented. The convictions stood untouched; only the punishment changed, and the court reduced the sentences itself rather than sending the case back to Lake County for a fresh hearing. Ferrell left death row and began serving two life sentences without the possibility of parole in the Florida state prison system.
For twelve years the sentence was final. Then, on June 25, 2012, the Supreme Court of the United States decided Miller v. Alabama, holding that a mandatory sentence of life without parole for a person under eighteen at the time of the crime violated the Eighth Amendment. Ferrell sought a new sentencing hearing, and so did a co-defendant in the Eustis case who had also been a juvenile in 1996 and was serving life without parole.
Miller had not said whether its rule reached sentences that were already final. The Third District Court of Appeal in Miami held that it did not. In January 2013 the Fifth District Court of Appeal in Daytona Beach agreed. The practical result was plain: Ferrell and his co-defendant would not get new sentencing hearings. Their sentences, final since long before 2012, stood.
The legislature answered Miller in its 2014 session. Chapter 2014-220, Laws of Florida, which took effect on July 1, 2014, rewrote the sentencing of juveniles convicted of capital murder. Under the new section 775.082(1)(b), a person who had actually killed and was under eighteen at the time could be sentenced to life only after a separate sentencing hearing at which the court found life appropriate; if the court found otherwise, the sentence was a term of at least 40 years. The new section 921.1401 listed what the court had to weigh at that hearing: the nature of the offense, its effect on the victims' families and the community, the defendant's age, maturity and mental and emotional health at the time, his background, the role of immaturity and of peer or family pressure, the extent of his participation, his prior record and the possibility of rehabilitation. A companion provision, section 921.1402, gave an offender sentenced under the new scheme the right to a judicial review of the sentence after 25 years.
The law spoke only to crimes committed on or after its effective date. On March 19, 2015, the Supreme Court of Florida closed the gap. In Horsley v. State it held that the 2014 law supplied the remedy for every juvenile offender whose sentence violated Miller, whatever the date of the crime. In Falcon v. State, decided the same day, it answered the question that had stopped Ferrell in 2013, holding that Miller applies retroactively to juvenile offenders whose convictions and sentences were already final when Miller was decided. The court gave affected prisoners two years from the issuance of its mandate to file a motion under Florida Rule of Criminal Procedure 3.850 asking the trial court to correct the sentence, and it held that the proper remedy was a resentencing hearing under the 2014 law.
The Supreme Court of the United States reached the same result for the whole country on January 25, 2016, in Montgomery v. Louisiana. By then Ferrell's path back to Lake County was already open. In April 2016 he was still serving his life sentence, with a resentencing now a real prospect rather than a hope.
The co-defendant who had been sixteen in 1996 reached court first. His resentencing hearing in Lake County was set for Monday, March 27, 2017, and was postponed that day. When it went forward, in 2018, a circuit judge set aside his life sentence and resentenced him to 40 years in prison. The two had been serving the same punishment for the same deaths, and under the 2014 law the court had to weigh the statutory factors for each of them separately.
Ferrell's own resentencing hearing opened in Tavares in November 2019. By then he had spent more than half his life in custody. His lawyers asked the court to reduce the life sentence.
The hearing turned on the factors in section 921.1401. On Tuesday, November 19, the defense called a psychologist who testified about Ferrell's childhood and his mental state in 1996. The state's answer went to credibility: it argued that Ferrell had tried to manipulate the mental-health examinations on which the defense experts relied. Both sides took up his state of mind at the time of the crimes.
On Wednesday, November 20, Ferrell took the stand himself. He apologized to the victims' families. "I can not tell you how many nights over these decades that I have wished with all of my soul," he began, and he told the court that in the years since he had found faith and had become a better person.
The decision rested with the circuit judge. Ferrell remained in custody in Florida serving a life sentence.
Ferrell said in court in 1998 that some of those arrested with him were innocent. Each of the others was prosecuted on his or her own charges.
At the 2019 hearing the defense and the state disputed Ferrell's mental state and credibility. The defense evidence on his childhood was the testimony of an expert witness, and the state contended that he had manipulated his examinations. Neither account bore on guilt, which his plea had settled in 1998; both bore only on sentence.
November 25, 1996: The two victims die in Eustis, Lake County, Florida.
November 28, 1996: Ferrell and four others are arrested in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
December 3, 1996: The only adult in the group is returned to Florida to face murder charges.
December 4, 1996: She is denied bond in Tavares; Ferrell and three others await extradition from Louisiana.
February 1998: Ferrell pleads guilty to two counts of first-degree murder and to burglary and robbery counts; a penalty-phase jury recommends death.
February 27, 1998: A Lake County circuit judge sentences him to death on both murder counts.
1999: In Brennan v. State, the Supreme Court of Florida holds a death sentence for a sixteen-year-old unconstitutional under the state constitution.
November 9, 2000: The Supreme Court of Florida affirms Ferrell's convictions and reduces his sentences to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.
June 25, 2012: Miller v. Alabama is decided.
January 2013: The Fifth District Court of Appeal holds that Miller does not reach final sentences; Ferrell and a co-defendant are denied new sentencing hearings.
July 1, 2014: Chapter 2014-220, Florida's new juvenile sentencing law, takes effect.
March 19, 2015: In Falcon v. State and Horsley v. State, the Supreme Court of Florida makes Miller retroactive and orders resentencing under the 2014 law.
January 25, 2016: Montgomery v. Louisiana makes Miller retroactive nationwide.
March 27, 2017: The co-defendant's resentencing hearing in Lake County is postponed.
2018: The co-defendant is resentenced to 40 years.
November 19-20, 2019: Ferrell's resentencing hearing in Tavares; he testifies and apologizes to the families.