Florida executes man for fatal 1989 home invasion

by · UPI

Dec. 9 (UPI) -- Florida on Tuesday executed a 58-year-old man convicted of murdering a Panama City mother during a home invasion in February 1989, a record 18th death row inmate killed by the Sunshine State this year.

Mark Geralds was executed by lethal injection Tuesday evening at the Florida State Prison in Raiford, about 47 miles southwest of Jacksonville. He was pronounced dead at 6:15 p.m. EST, the Florida Department of Corrections said in a statement.

Geralds had waived his right to appeal after Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis issued his death warrant last month, making him a rare execution volunteer.

But his waiver follows protracted litigation in which he alleged prosecutorial misconduct, including ineffective assistance counsel, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

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Geralds was convicted and sentenced to death in 1990, only to have his death sentence vacated by the Florida Supreme Court. However, he was re-sentenced to death in 1993.

Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty has argued that he waived his rights to appeal despite a slew of issues surrounding his case including suppressed evidence, untested forensics, the minimization of his mental health history during the waiver hearing and a lack of a meaningful attorney-client relationship, among other issues.

"Mark lost the will to fight. After decades of challenging the validity of his conviction and sentence, uncovering evidence that the state had hidden and withheld from his jury and without further DNA analysis, Mark waived his remaining appeals and asked to die," the FADP said in a statement issued after Geralds was killed.

"The state of Florida treated Mark's volunteer status as a gift. His waiver became a shortcut. An opportunity to add another tally to this administration's death count without confronting the serious constitutional defects in his case. They capitalized on his despair."

Geralds was convicted of killing 33-year-old Tressa Lynn Pettibone on Feb. 1, 1989.

According to court documents, Geralds was a carpenter who had done remodeling work at the Pettibones' home. A week before the murder, Geralds encountered Pettibone and her children at a shopping mall, where she informed him that her husband was out of town on business. Geralds later spoke to 8-year-old Bart Pettibone at an arcade where he asked the boy when his father would be back and when he and his sister attended school.

On Feb. 1, Bart Pettibone returned home from school to find his mother dead on their kitchen floor. Court documents state she was stabbed twice in the neck and suffered a fatal stab to her left side, the knife found in the kitchen sink. The medical examiner found she also suffered blunt force trauma, her wrists bound with plastic ties for a minimum of 20 minutes.

The jury heard from the victim's daughter, Blyth Pettibone, and husband, Kevin Pettibone, that several items of jewelry, a pair of red Bucci sunglasses and Tressa Pettibone's Mercedes were stolen, with the vehicle later found in the parking lot of a nearby school.

Court documents state that circumstantial evidence linking Geralds to the crime included him on the day of the murder pawning a gold herringbone chain necklace stained by Tressa Pettibone's blood, testimony that he had gifted someone a pair of red Bucci glasses like those that had been stolen and a plastic tie recovered from Geralds' car, among other evidence.

Geralds was the 18th person to be executed by Florida this year, far surpassing its previous record of eight, which was set back in 2014.

There have been 44 executions so far in the United States for the year, with at least three more scheduled. Frank Athen Walls has been scheduled to be killed by Florida on Dec. 18.

Since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976, at least 165 death row inmates, representing 10% of all executions, have been so-called execution volunteers, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.