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Murderer exhausts another appeal to avoid deathBy JAMIE MALERNEE © St. Petersburg Times, published February 27, 2001 Todd Mendyk is one step closer to death. A federal judge has denied the killer's latest appeal, ruling that Mendyk's trial lawyers were competent and did the best they could to represent a client who confessed three times and expressed no remorse for one of the most brutal murders in Hernando County history. "There are some cases that simply cannot be won," U.S. District Judge Susan Bucklew wrote in her Feb. 12 ruling. "This is one of those cases. Counsel is not ineffective simply because a client is convicted, and, under these facts, a conviction was virtually certain." Mendyk's current lawyers argue that their client should be resentenced because jurors never heard details about Mendyk's troubled childhood and mental problems that might have led them to recommend life in prison rather than death. Mendyk was convicted in 1987 of kidnapping, raping and murdering a Spring Hill convenience clerk he tortured for hours before strangling her in the woods off U.S. 19. In an evidentiary hearing in July, Mendyk's current lawyers presented witnesses who testified that Mendyk was physically and mentally abused as a boy and, as early as age 9, began developing violent fantasies about women. These fantasies grew into the delusion that women were made to be sex slaves and that if he raped a woman, she would come to worship him and bond with him for life. Experts for the state countered that Mendyk knew these fantasies were wrong and chose to act on them anyway. Public Defender Alan Fanter, one of Mendyk's trial lawyers, also testified that he had a doctor evaluate Mendyk's mental state, but he decided not to put the expert on the stand because, upon cross-examination, the doctor would have to testify to "a lot of bad stuff . . . that would have outweighed the good." For example, Mendyk told officials that killing the woman was easy, "like lighting a cigarette," and that the only thing he regretted was being caught. If he could do it again, Fanter said Mendyk had told the expert, he would. Bucklew wrote that none of the mitigating factors presented in Mendyk's favor during the hearing could have offset the brutality of his crime or resulted in a sentence other than death. She said his case could be "generously described as hopeless." Fanter did not return calls for comment Monday. Assistant Attorney General Ken Nunnelley, who argued that state's case before Bucklew, said he was pleased but not surprised by the judge's ruling. "This is truly a horrible case, one of the worst I've ever seen," he said. "(Given that,) the defendant's attorneys did a good job. I don't know what more they could have done." Mark Gruber, Mendyk's current lawyer, said he plans to appeal the case to the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta.
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