The Florida Supreme Court has once again informed death row inmate David Sparre that no, he may not have another bite at the appellate apple. On December 4th, the justices unanimously rejected his second successive motion for postconviction relief, this time centered on the claim that the jury who sentenced him was unconstitutionally selected. It’s the latest round in a long line of attempts by Sparre to convince the courts that something, anything, about his trial was unfair to him.

For those who may have forgotten or never heard this story before, Sparre was the man who, in 2010, met 21-year-old Jacksonville mother of two, Tiara Pool, through Craigslist’s Casual Encounters section. Pool, who was juggling college, motherhood, and relationship issues while her husband was in the Navy, invited Sparre into her home. He repaid that trust by stabbing her roughly ninety times with a knife from her own kitchen before stealing a gaming system and leaving her for dead. He denied responsibility at first but eventually confessed, even bragging in a letter that he had always wanted to kill someone and “enjoyed” doing it. The jury took him at his word, and in 2012 he was sentenced to death.

Despite what the article I used as a source claims, the murder did not “gain national attention.” That’s a generous rewriting of history. In reality, the case barely made a ripple outside Florida. The reasons aren’t mysterious. Pool was a young Black woman, which has never been a reliable ticket to the top of the national news cycle. The murder happened in the South, where crimes involving women of color often receive minimal coverage. And at the time, Craigslist murders were so depressingly common that they blended together for most editors. It should have been national news. It wasn’t.

Now, fourteen years later, Sparre’s defense tried again to unwind the verdict by wielding something called the “Gau Study,” a 2021 unpublished statistical analysis of jury selection trends in Duval County’s capital cases. They argued that the study proved the process systematically weeded out certain groups through death qualification and peremptory strikes, resulting in a jury that didn’t represent the community. In TL;DR terms, his jury didn’t look enough like Jacksonville, and therefore the sentence should be tossed.

Justice Jamie Grosshans, writing for a unanimous court, was unconvinced. Not only was the study not “newly discovered evidence,” the underlying data had been available for years, but the entire argument was aiming at the wrong target. The Constitution requires that the jury pool be a fair cross-section of the community; it has never required that the twelve people who ultimately sit in the box reflect demographic proportions with mathematical precision. The Sixth Amendment doesn’t promise a defendant a jury that resembles a census chart. And the attempt to stretch this into an Eighth Amendment argument fared no better, for the simple reason that no legal precedent supports such an interpretation.

And so the ruling stands: denial affirmed, all justices concurring. Sparre remains on death row, where he has been since 2012, still exhausting the appeals the law allows him to pursue. That is, after all, a protection he is entitled to.

Tiara Pool never received such a protection. Her life ended the moment Sparre decided he wanted to take it, with no possibility of appeal, reconsideration, or reprieve. If only she had been afforded the same opportunity Sparre continues to enjoy.

(Source)

• Florida Supreme Court Rejects ‘Biased Jury’ Bid By ‘Craigslist Killer’ David Kelsey Sparre