A day after a Marion County circuit judge rejected their arguments, attorneys for Death Row inmate Loran Cole on Friday appealed to the Florida Supreme Court as they try to prevent his scheduled Aug. 29 execution.
A notice of appeal, as is common, did not detail arguments that Cole’s attorneys will make at the Supreme Court.
The court set a Wednesday deadline for filing a brief.
Gov. Ron DeSantis on July 29 signed a death warrant for Cole, 57, who was convicted in the 1994 murder of Florida State University student John Edwards, who was camping with his sister, a student at Eckerd College, in the Ocala National Forest.
Marion County Circuit Judge Robert Hodges on Thursday refused to vacate Cole’s death sentence.
Cole’s attorneys argued, in part, that a new law compensating victims of abuse at the state’s notorious Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys should give the case a fresh review.
The attorneys argued that abuse Cole suffered as a teen at Dozier, a now-shuttered reform school in Marianna, contributed to his criminal behavior.
A law signed this year by DeSantis to compensate Dozier abuse victims added a new angle to Cole’s appeals.
The law, Cole’s attorneys argued, amounted to new evidence that could have had an impact on a jury’s unanimous death-penalty recommendation in 1995.
But Hodges disagreed, finding that “evidence regarding defendant’s (Cole’s) treatment while he attended the Dozier School is not newly discovered evidence.”
The judge said Cole’s lawyers repeatedly raised the issue of his treatment at Dozier in prior appeals, to no avail.
Cole and another man, William Paul, joined the brother and sister at their campsite. After they decided to walk to a pond, Cole knocked Edwards’ sister to the ground and ultimately handcuffed her, the records said.
Paul took the sister up a trail, and John Edwards died from a slashed throat and blows to the head that fractured his skull, according to the court records.
Edwards’ sister was sexually assaulted and was tied to two trees the next morning before freeing herself. (In most cases, The News Service of Florida does not identify sexual-assault victims by name.)
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