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Eddie Lee Sexton sentenced to death
By SUE CARLTON © St. Petersburg Times, published November 19, 1998 With that, Circuit Judge J. Rogers Padgett followed the recommendation of a jury and sentenced the Ohio family patriarch to die in the electric chair for the 1993 murder of Sexton's son-in-law in a Florida park. The 56-year-old father of 12, who authorities say controlled his children with years of incest and horrific abuse, sat passively in a wheelchair in the courtroom, nodding his head when the judge delivered the sentence. Two months earlier, when the jury that convicted him then recommended the death penalty by a vote of 8-4, Sexton merely shrugged. "That's life," he told his attorney then. It was, after all, Sexton's second time around. In 1994, he was convicted and sentenced to death in the murder of his daughter's husband, Joel Good, but won a new trial after the Florida Supreme Court ruled the jury should not have heard certain lurid details of the bizarre Sexton household. The Sexton children told authorities their father persuaded them he had Satanic powers and repeatedly raped and beat them. Sexton, his wife and several children were on the run from child abuse charges in Ohio when they camped out at the Hillsborough River State Park five years ago. Sexton's daughter smothered her infant son after her father ordered her to quiet the child, and the boy's body was buried in the park. Good began talking of taking his son's body back to Ohio, so Sexton taught his son, Willie, then 22, how to strangle a man using a rope twisted tight with sticks. Good's body, too, was buried in a park. Willie Sexton, who was sexually abused throughout his childhood and who spent more than a year in a state mental hospital after his arrest, testified against his father and was sentenced to 25 years in prison on a second-degree murder charge. "The evidence clearly showed the dominance of the defendant over his simple-minded son achieved by a lifetime of cruel, insidious and humiliating physical, emotional and sexual abuse," Padgett wrote in his order. Sexton's attorney, Robert Fraser, said he believes certain testimony, including mitigating evidence about Sexton's own mental condition, could be factors in an appeal. "I don't think the evidence supports the idea that Willie is a robot," Fraser said.
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AMPA -- Eddie Lee Sexton was even more responsible for the murder of a relative than the "simple-minded" son Sexton used as his "weapon of choice" to do the job, a judge wrote in an order released Wednesday.
