TALLAHASSEE — The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday rejected an appeal by Florida Death Row inmate James Ford, setting the stage for his execution Thursday in the 1997 murders of a couple in Charlotte County.
The Supreme Court declined to issue a stay of execution or to take up an appeal by Ford. As is common, the Supreme Court did not explain its reasons.
Gov. Ron DeSantis on Jan. 10 issued a death warrant for Ford, 64, who would be the first inmate executed in Florida this year. A Charlotte County circuit judge and the Florida Supreme Court also rejected arguments by Ford’s attorneys seeking to spare him from execution.
The execution is scheduled at 6 p.m. Thursday at Florida State Prison.
Ford received two death sentences in the murders of Greg and Kimberly Malnory at a Charlotte County sod farm where he and Greg Malnory worked. In trying to halt the execution, Ford’s attorneys argued that he had the mental and developmental age of a 14-year-old at the time of the murders — though he was 36.
The attorneys tried to draw a connection with a 2005 U.S. Supreme Court decision, known as Roper v. Simmons, that barred executing defendants who were under age 18 at the time of their crimes. The Supreme Court said such executions would violate the U.S. Constitution’s Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
In a document filed at the U.S. Supreme Court, Ford’s attorneys wrote that it “is beyond dispute that the Eighth Amendment's prohibition of ‘cruel and unusual punishments’ is not a static command.”
“The class of offenders subject to the death penalty should be narrowed again to preclude the execution of individuals with a mental and developmental age less than age 18,” the attorneys wrote. “James Ford’s mental and developmental age was less than age 18 at the time of the capital offense he was convicted of, and his execution should therefore be prohibited as cruel and unusual punishment under the federal Eighth Amendment, as applied to the states through the federal Fourteenth Amendment (which ensures due process rights).”
But the Florida Attorney General’s Office disputed the arguments about Ford’s developmental age.
“Ford cites no case — federal or state — expanding Roper to an individual who was 18 or older at the time of the capital offense,” the attorney general’s office said in arguments filed at the U.S. Supreme Court.
Ford made plans to go fishing with the couple at the sod farm, which was in a remote area. The next day, April 7, 1997, another employee discovered the couple’s bodies.
Ford would be put to death by lethal injection less than six months after Loran Cole was executed Aug. 29 in the 1994 murder of Florida State University student John Edwards, who was camping in the Ocala National Forest.
Florida did not execute any inmates in 2020, 2021 and 2022 but put to death six men in 2023.
They were Michael Duane Zack, who was executed for a 1996 murder in Escambia County; James Phillip Barnes, who was executed for the 1988 murder of a woman in her Melbourne condominium; Duane Owen, who was executed for the 1984 murder of a Palm Beach County woman; Darryl Barwick, who was executed for the 1986 murder of a woman in her Panama City apartment; Louis Gaskin, who was executed for the 1989 murders of a couple in Flagler County; and Donald David Dillbeck, who was executed for the 1990 murder of a woman during a carjacking in a Tallahassee mall parking lot.