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Published Friday, October 7, 2005
Four Inmates Lose Appeals
One of the men is suspected of killing a 14-year-old girl from Lakeland.
The Associated Press
TALLAHASSEE -- A former police officer convicted of raping, strangling and drowning an 11-year-old girl while on duty in 1987 is among four longtime death row inmates who lost appeals Thursday in the Florida Supreme Court.
The justices for a second time affirmed the conviction and death sentence of James Duckett, 48. He was a rookie police officer in Mascotte, a small town in Lake County, when Teresa McAbee vanished from a convenience store where she had gone to buy a pencil. The girl's body was found in a nearby lake.
The former police officer is also a suspect in the 1987 murder of a 14-year-old Lakeland girl, Jeanifer Shyan Weldon.
Soon after being questioned in McAbee's murder, Duckett was fired from the Mascotte Police Department and took a mining job near Bartow.
The night Weldon disappeared, Duckett would have been driving to work on U.S. 98 North, where the 14-year-old girl was walking the night she disappeared, according to Polk County Sheriff's detectives.
Weldon's decomposed body was found Oct. 2, 1987, off a remote dirt road south of Fort Meade.
Even with Duckett on death row, detectives still are pursuing him as a suspect in Weldon's murder.
"He's not going anywhere until he's dead," said Polk County Sheriff's Chief W.J. Martin, who heads the Criminal Investigations division. "We're still going to pursue it. It's one of those things we're trying to piece together.
"He's the only suspect. We have another case he needs to be charged with."
The high court, which initially ruled against Duckett in 1990, unanimously rejected several new arguments for a reversal, including recanted testimony by a prosecution witness and allegations that he received ineffective legal representation at trial.
Witness Grace Gwendolyn Gurley had testified she saw Duckett and McAbee at the store on the night of the murder, May 11, 1987, and then a few minutes later heard him summon the girl to his police car. Gurley said she then heard a door shut and saw a man and a "small person" inside the car.
She later claimed she had not
been at the store and that police had told her what to say at trial. Gurley, convicted of three PLEASE SEE SUSPECT, PAGE B2
unrelated felonies, also denied she had received any type of deal in exchange for her testimony.
In a subsequent interview, though, she again said she had been at the store and saw the police car leave with a passenger. She then refused to testify at a formal hearing, invoking her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.
"Recantation by a witness called on behalf of the prosecution does not necessarily entitle a defendant to a new trial," the justices wrote.
"Based on her statements at the evidentiary hearing, it appears that she would not testify to anything new at a new trial," they concluded. "In fact, she would not testify at all. Therefore, the purported change in her testimony would be unlikely to result in a different verdict."
The high court added that other evidence was sufficient for a conviction -- including tire tracks at the crime scene consistent with Duckett's car, the victim's fingerprints on its hood and testimony that he had sex on duty with one teenage girl and made advances toward two others.
The justices also found that Duckett had failed to show that his lawyer's performance was deficient or that it prejudiced him.
The Supreme Court had sent the case back to the trial court for DNA testing of the victim's clothing, which was inconclusive. Duckett contended it also should have had other items tested, including two cigarette butts, a flip-flop, two beer bottles and a beer can. The justices disagreed, noting their order covered only clothing.
The state justices also unanimously ruled that a U.S. Supreme Court decision limiting secondhand, or hearsay, evidence could not be applied retroactively, and therefore let stand the murder convictions and death sentences of:
Jim Eric Chandler, 51, convicted for the 1980 stabbing deaths of an elderly couple in Indian River County;
McArthur Breedlove, 58, convicted for the 1978 stabbing death of a man during a residential burglary in Miami-Dade County;
Michael Duane Zack, 36, convicted for the 1996 stabbing and beating death of a woman he had met at a beach bar in Escambia County. Zack also was convicted and sentenced to life for a similar murder in Okaloosa County.
Ledger reporter Gabrielle Finley contributed to this report.