Witness' prosthesis biased jury, appeals says

A man convicted of murder was unfairly sentenced to death after a woman he had mutilated pointed him out, the man's lawyer says.

By LUCY MORGAN

© St. Petersburg Times, published May 12, 2000

TALLAHASSEE -- Lawyers for convicted murderer Lawrence Singleton say that a Tampa jury was unduly prejudiced when witness Mary Vincent raised her right prosthetic hook and swore to tell the truth in court two years ago.

The argument is among several raised in an appeal to the Florida Supreme Court. Lawyers for both sides were in court Thursday to argue the case.

Singleton, convicted of cutting off Vincent's arms and leaving her for dead in California in 1978, says the judge who let jurors see Vincent's hooks was merely inflaming the jury. She testified in the sentencing phase of Singleton's trial before jurors voted 10-2 for the death penalty in the 1997 murder of Tampa prostitute Roxanne Hayes.

On the witness stand in Tampa, Vincent identified Singleton, pointing with her hook, as the man who kidnapped and raped her before cutting off her arms and leaving her in a ditch.

Assistant Public Defender Paul C. Helm argued Singleton's case before the state's highest court. Singleton, now 72, remains on death row.

The objection to displaying the hooks before the jury is among the issues Singleton has raised in an appeal of the death sentence imposed by Hillsborough Circuit Judge Bob Anderson Mitcham in 1998.

"While the view of Ms. Vincent was no doubt unpleasant, this is because Singleton chose to chop off Ms. Vincent's arms with an ax after he raped her," said Assistant Attorney General Scott Browne.

Notorious for the rape and mutilation of the then-15-year-old California teenager, Singleton was arrested in Hillsborough County in 1997 after Hayes was found dead on the floor of Singleton's apartment.

Singleton moved back home to Tampa in 1988 after no California community would accept him. He was forced to serve his time on parole in a travel trailer on the grounds at San Quentin Prison in California.

Mitcham's failure to dismiss all of the potential jurors who had heard about Singleton's previous crime and the judge's failure to explain how he weighed mitigating and aggravating circumstances that led to the death sentence were at the core of Helm's oral argument.

Three jurors who knew about Singleton's past crime and a fourth who said he could not accept a defense blaming the crime on alcoholism were allowed to remain in the jury pool but did not actually sit on the jury that convicted him. Defense attorneys were forced to use some of their own challenges to eliminate the prospective jurors.

Helm said one of those jurors thought Singleton had killed Vincent.

Browne, arguing for the state, dismissed the jury complaint, noting that none of them actually served on the Singleton jury. And he said that 75 other potential jurors were dismissed because they had knowledge of the case from extensive pretrial publicity.

"It would stand the law on its head," said Justice Barbara Pariente as she asked Helm how any notorious defendant could be tried if all jurors who knew about the past could be tossed aside.

All the jurors who were not thrown off the panel said they could lay aside the things they'd heard and rely on the evidence at trial.

Other justices suggested that the jury questions are clearly up to the trial judge.

"But discretion is not without limits," Helm argued. "It is inconsistent for the court to deny these challenges when two of the three were aware that the girl had her arms chopped off."

At sentencing, defense attorneys argued that Singleton had been a model prisoner in California and deserved credit for a career in the Merchant Marine. Singleton also was suffering from severe alcoholism, dementia, emotional disturbances and brain damage that made him unable to control his behavior. Mitcham did not adequately explain how he weighed those mitigating factors against the aggravating factors of Singleton's conviction for a violent crime against a young woman and the extremely violent murder of the Tampa woman who was repeatedly stabbed while she cried for help, Helm said.

The court issued no immediate ruling.

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