Duval County Circuit Judge Mallory Cooper remains mum on when she will decide whether to dismiss the murder case against Jacksonville teen Cristian Fernandez as requested by his defense team last month.
Lawyers from both sides and Cooper agreed during a pre-trial hearing Thursday morning that a potentially impactful case decided by an appellate court Wednesday offered no guidance for the judge's decision.
The only other action Thursday involved brief arguments whether to allow the defense to redepose the first police officer to interact with Fernandez after his 2-year-old half brother, David Galarraga, was taken to the hospital with what turned out
to be a fatal head injury in March 2011.
That officer, Travis Laffitte, spent several hours with Fernandez after police responded to the apartment where the injury occurred. Among the things Laffitte said Fernandez told him was David suffered the injury when he fell off a bunk bed. The prosecution has contended the child was slammed into a bookshelf.
Defense Attorney Hank Coxe argued that Fernandez's public defender at the time failed to ask relevant questions of Laffittee, causing the need for the request to redepose him. Prosecutor Mark Caliel countered that the questioning was thorough and that Laffittee would have nothing of relevance to add if questioned again.
Cooper requested a transcript of the first deposition and took the arguments under advisement.
Fernandez, 13, waived his appearance in court Thursday.
In the potentially impactful appellate case, the First District Court of Appeal ruled in Gonzalez v. Florida that defendant Jose Gonzalez is not entitled to relief of his mandatory life sentence despite a U.S. Supreme ruling earlier this year that such sentences for juveniles was unconstitutional.
Gonzalez was 17 in 2008 when he repeatedly stabbed a man to death in the Panhandle. A jury convicted him of first-degree, premeditated murder and sentenced him to a mandatory life sentence under the state law that existed at the time.
The appellate court ruled that because the Gonzalez case involved a post-conviction appeal in a case decided before the Supreme Court's June ruling in Miller v. Alabama, Gonzalez was not entitled to relief. The decision in Miller v. Alabama found that sentencing juveniles to a mandatory term of life in prison without parole for murder is cruel and unusual punishment.
Fernandez prosecutor Mark Caliel argued last month that a remedy for Fernandez no longer facing a mandatory life sentence is to revive an earlier available punishment if convicted.
Attorneys for Fernandez, who was 12 when charged in David's death, countered that the earlier punishment of a minimum 25 years to life is not part of the existing state statute governing prison time for juveniles in first-degree murder cases and can’t be used. The Legislature upped the punishment to mandatory life in 1994.
Fernandez's attorneys have argued that since there are no longer specific statutory punishments, such cases must be dismissed under the due process clause of the Constitution. They argued that defendants are now unable to decide how to proceed, including the pursuit of a plea bargain, since they are unaware what ultimate punishment they could face.
They also argued that imposing a punishment under the pre-1994 statute range would lead to possible parole, which the Legislature abolished years ago. Caliel argued that parole is still applicable when someone is charged in a cold case murder predating the legislative change.
Caliel conceded that Fernandez can’t be sentenced to death or a mandatory life sentence under rulings by the Supreme Court, but it wasn’t the court’s intent to prevent prosecutors from seeking first-degree murder charges against juveniles. Caliel said the Miller decision only referenced the constitutional nature of the punishment imposed, but did not expand to the state’s authority to charge juvenile offenders under the law.
The next pre-trial hearing in the Fernandez case is set for Nov. 15.
