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Thread: Mark Allen Geralds - Florida Death Row

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    Mark Allen Geralds - Florida Death Row




    Summary of Offense:

    On February 1, 1989, the eight-year-old son of Tressa and Kevin Pettibone found his mother beaten and stabbed to death on the kitchen floor. Tressa Pettibone had two stab wounds on the right side of her neck and one fatal stab wound on the left side. These stab wounds were consistent with a knife found in the kitchen sink. The medical examiner also found a number of bruises and abrasions on the head, face, chest, and abdomen of the victim that were caused by some form of blunt trauma. According to the medical examiner, the victim’s wrists had been bound with a plastic tie for at least twenty minutes prior to her death. A number of items were missing from the home, including the victim’s car. Geralds was a carpenter who had helped remodel the Pettibone’s home prior to the murder. Circumstantial evidence connected Geralds to the crime: Geralds knew that Kevin Pettibone was out of town at the time of the crime and Geralds separately asked Tressa Pettibone and the children when Mr. Pettibone would be returning; Geralds pawned jewelry from the Pettibone home that had traces of blood that were consistent with Tressa Pettibone’s blood type, but inconsistent with Geralds’ blood type; Geralds gave the victim’s sunglasses to a friend; Geralds’ shoes were consistent with the shoes used to make tracks on the floor of the Pettibone’s home; and plastic ties used to bind the victim matched ties found in Geralds’ car.

    Geralds was sentenced to death in Bay County on April 13, 1993.

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    On September 6, 2010, Geralds was denied a writ of habeas corpus by the Florida Supreme Court.

    Opinion is here:

    http://www.floridasupremecourt.org/d...0/sc07-716.pdf

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    September 17, 2010

    Conviction upheld in 20-year-old murder

    PANAMA CITY — A death row inmate convicted of murdering a Panama City woman 20 years ago will stay in prison after the Florida Supreme Court ruled against him Thursday.

    In a 61-page ruling, the court affirmed a Circuit Court ruling that denied a motion by Mark Geralds to vacate his conviction and death sentence and release him from prison.

    Geralds was convicted in 1990 of entering the home of 33-year-old Tressa Pettibone, beating her unconscious, binding her hands and stabbing her three times in the throat. A jury recommended the death penalty.

    In 1992, the Supreme Court upheld the conviction but ordered a new sentencing hearing. A new jury unanimously recommended the death penalty in 1993. Court records noted Geralds’ high IQ of 121 and his “superior ability to think in the abstract” were inconsistent with the notion that Geralds acted out of sudden rage.

    The Supreme Court in 1996 unanimously denied Geralds’ request for a new hearing and affirmed the death sentence against him.

    Geralds had been a carpenter and had worked on a remodeling job at the Pettibone home. He saw Tressa Pettibone at a mall with her two children a week before the murder. He found out Kevin Pettibone, Tressa’s husband, was out of town for several weeks, and he asked her children what time they left for and returned from school each day.

    “Geralds carefully planned this crime,” the Supreme Court noted in 1992.

    Geralds was 22 years old when Pettibone was killed. He is now 43. Calls to Geralds’ defense attorney were not returned.

    According to Roger Maas with the Capital Collateral Regional Counsels, an office that monitors death penalty cases in the state, there are roughly 10 death sentences handed down each year statewide.

    Capital cases automatically appeal to the Florida Supreme Court, but such cases are so complex that the court can only rule on two or three a year. Those two or three death penalty appeals take up about 50 percent of the Florida Supreme Court’s time, Maas said.

    O.H. Eaton, an 18th Circuit Court Judge and the longtime head of faculty at the Florida College for Advanced Judicial Studies, teaches a course on how to handle capital cases at the State’s Judicial College and the National Judicial College in Reno, Nev. The course is mandatory for any judge who might deal with death penalty cases.

    Eaton said Geralds’ appeal just passed the fifth step in what is typically a nine-step process. The next step would be an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, which is likely to be denied until the federal appeals process, which can take as long as federal judges deem necessary, has been exhausted and the case is fully developed.

    “At any step in this process the case can get kicked back one or more steps,” Eaton said.

    Since 1979, when the death penalty was reinstated in Florida, the average length of time a prisoner spends on death row is just under 13 years, according to the Department of Corrections. Before 1997, when the appeals system was reorganized, it often took as long as 20 years to execute a convict, Maas said.

    There are currently about 50 death row inmates who’ve exhausted their appeals and are only waiting for a death warrant from the governor, Maas said. There were 391 death row inmates in Florida as of Sept. 17.

    The prisoner most recently executed in Florida was Martin Grossman, who had been on death row more than 24 years before he was put to death Feb. 16.

    http://www.newsherald.com/news/old-8...ty-panama.html

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    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
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    ‘There's never any closure': 20 years after conviction, victim's family waits for killer's execution

    In 1989, the murder of Tressa Pettibone hit the quiet Panama City neighborhood known as the Cove like a storm. People started locking their doors. Neighbors would call the police when strangers walked down the street until the killer was caught.

    “It really turned the community upside down,” former State Attorney Jim Appleman said. “Prior to this, the Cove was a place where people walked around.”

    Like a hurricane, the damage spread outward from the center, a kitchen in a house on Hollis Avenue, where an 8-year-old boy sat on the floor wiping up his dead mother’s blood.

    “One person’s actions can change an entire community,” said 30-year-old Bart Pettibone, Tressa’s son. “It’s like peripheral or outer damage of a storm, when right there at the heart of it was where the most damage was done.”

    ****

    People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.—George Orwell

    The state of Florida has executed 69 prisoners since the United States Supreme Court reversed an earlier ruling and opened the door for states and the federal government to resume capital punishment in 1976. Another 393 prisoners are on death row, filing appeals or waiting for the governor to sign a death warrant.

    One of them is inmate 729185, Mark Geralds.

    On Feb. 7, 1990, a jury convicted Geralds of entering the Pettibone residence and beating Tressa Pettibone senseless, binding her hands and stabbing her three times in the neck. Eight of 12 jurors recommended the death penalty, which is what the judge gave him.

    Since that day, the Pettibone family has been waiting for justice, through the seemingly endless appeals, worried that some judges somewhere might overturn Geralds’ sentence.

    “With this, the appeals keep popping back and reopens the wounds so deep,” said Kevin Pettibone, who was Tressa’s husband. “It’s like you can’t ever get away from it. There’s never any closure.”

    In September, the Florida Supreme Court upheld Geralds’ conviction and sentence, setting in motion a clemency investigation. Last month was the deadline for Tressa’s survivors to write letters to the governor’s office before a ruling on clemency. Kevin, Bart and his sister, Blythe, each wrote a letter.

    The governor could sign a death warrant, but Geralds still can appeal to the federal government.

    Kevin, Blythe and Bart said they want to be there when the end comes for Mark Geralds. They said they know the appeals process is important, but 20 years is too long. The average length of time an inmate spends on death row is less than 13 years.

    “I believe it’s time,” said Blythe Carpenter, Bart’s sister. “I think it’s time to give our family the justice we deserve.”

    ****

    Kevin and Tressa Pettibone had been together half their lives. They were high school sweethearts in Ohio.

    It was common for Tressa to go with her husband when he left town on a job, and she begged him to bring her along on this particular trip to Cherry Hills, N.C. He turned her down.

    Kevin wrestled with his guilt for about a year before one day he snapped out of it.

    “It was like flipping a switch,” he said. He just decided there was nothing he could have done to protect her. Even if he hadn’t been out of town, there was no way he would have been home at 10 a.m. on a Wednesday.

    About two years after Tressa’s death, Kevin remarried. He has three other children with his second wife.

    But it’s been especially hard on Bart. He was so young, and to find his mother like that has scarred him permanently, Kevin said.

    “It’s probably affected him more,” said Blythe Carpenter. “That’s a lot for an 8-year old to take on and I don’t think he’s ever fully gotten past it, not that he ever would have.”

    ****

    The murder of Tressa Pettibone was particularly brutal. The stab wounds to her neck caused her to drown in her blood, which would have taken about five minutes. She didn’t bleed out. She would have been lucky to bleed out, Bart said.

    “It was probably the most brutal case I’ve ever handled,” said Appleman, who was State Attorney for the 14th Judicial Circuit for more than 20 years.

    The crime scene left Bart with this impression. “You could tell that the time they spent together was really violent, really beyond the scope of most people getting angry,” he said.

    There was plenty of evidence to show that he had planned to kill her.

    Mark Geralds had worked as a laborer at the Pettibones’ home during a remodel in 1987, so when Tressa, 14-year-old Blythe and Bart saw Geralds at the Panama City mall the week before her death, Tressa gave him a hug and treated him to a cinnamon roll.

    Bart went to play games at the arcade, and after awhile Geralds came down to talk to him. He described their conversation as being like an interrogation. Geralds was asking him when he and his sister left for school in the morning and when they got home in the afternoon. Your dad is out of town for several weeks, right? When will he come home?

    Bart answered the questions. Geralds learned when Tressa would be home alone and vulnerable. It didn’t seem strange at the time; now Bart is filled with deep regret.

    On Feb. 1, 1989, Geralds went went to rob the Pettibones. He was looking for valuables and cash hidden in the house, but he needed someone to show him where they were. Tressa would recognize him. He brought the ties to bind her wrists.

    ****

    It is a crippling feeling for Bart Pettibone to be at the mercy of other men.

    He is waiting to see some anonymous civilian strap Geralds to a table and stick a needle in him, pump him full of sodium thiopental, pancuronium bromide and potassium chloride, “like going and putting a pet to sleep,” Bart said.

    It’s not how Bart would choose to see Geralds die — he said he would prefer to do it himself in a more savage manner — but it will have to suffice. If the victims were allowed to carry out the punishment personally, the death penalty might actually be an effective deterrent, Bart said. “I would welcome the invitation,” he said. “Then he would know what it means to fear.”

    The walls at the Union Correctional Institute in Raiford don’t protect society from Mark Geralds, Bart said. They protect Mark Geralds from Bart Pettibone. “Geralds is hiding in the American judicial system,” Bart said. “This is 20 years you’ve had someone turn the system on itself.”

    Many death sentences are overturned on appeal. Six death row inmates have been resentenced to life so far in 2010. Thirteen more were resentenced the previous two years. For Bart, seeing Geralds resentenced to life would be the ultimate tease.

    ****

    Between the idea and the reality, Between the motion and the act, Falls the Shadow — T.S. Elliot

    The 8-year-old boy who found his mother is gone. Bart Pettibone studies prolific killers, looking for answers he never finds. Jack the Ripper, Gacy, Manson, Bundy. He is trying to figure out what allows people to act in such a way. He said he still doesn’t know.

    Bart is a man now, he has a family of his own, but the things that boy saw still are with him.

    Pettibone groups people into two camps: those who are with him and everyone else. He is fiercely loyal to his Cove boys, but he keeps people at arm’s length. He is slow to trust people.

    He avoids talking about his mom’s death with his wife, Tiffany Ann, and their children, but not because he doesn’t trust them. He wants to keep them from his reality, to protect her. They should be allowed to keep their illusions.

    At night as he falls asleep, Bart often listens to Bobby Kennedy’s remarks to Cleveland City Club on the day after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. “Whenever any American’s life is taken by another American unnecessarily…whenever we tear at the fabric of life which another man has painfully and clumsily woven together for himself and his children, the whole nation is degraded,” Kennedy said.

    “It’s a beautiful idea and a beautiful dream,” Bart said, but it ultimately was unrealistic. Look how things turned out for Bobby.

    Bart is fully cognizant of the contradiction. He has seen the horror of a violent death and he knows it is pointless. Violence breeds more violence, he said, and he knows watching Geralds die won’t bring his mother back. But it sure would feel good.

    “I know that he’s renting space in my head,” Bart said.

    Part of him envies the lawyers who work on these appeals and then move on to the next case.

    “You don’t have that luxury when you’re in the eye of the storm.”

    ****

    Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn. — C.S. Lewis

    The way we see the world is not necessarily the way the world is. The way we see the world is an illusion we allow ourselves to believe in.

    We surround ourselves with illusions: that men are civilized, trustworthy, and we are safe. We are not safe, not even in our homes, in our beds at night. Even then we are the mercy of others. At least that is what Bart Pettibone believes.

    It was a conclusion Pettibone came to more than 20 years ago when he came home from school and all his illusions were destroyed. Mom was dead on the kitchen floor, blood soaked in her favorite blouse. Time slowed to a crawl but Bart’s thoughts raced through his mind, blinking, flashing.

    The 8-year-old boy got a pair of scissors and tried to cut the plastic ties that bound his mother’s lifeless wrists, but the blades kept splitting.

    She had been dead for hours, even an 8-year-old could tell that. He tried to move her but he wasn’t strong enough, so he sat with her for an hour or so and he talked to her. Like everything else about that day, Bart remembers what he said to her, but he keeps it to himself.

    http://www.newsherald.com/news/famil...ler-never.html

  5. #5
    Senior Member CnCP Legend JLR's Avatar
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    Factors Contributing to the Delay in Imposition of Sentence:

    The 3.850 motion was pending from 09/22/97 – 01/18/06.

    Case Information

    :Geralds filed a Direct Appeal with the Florida Supreme Court on 04/30/90, citing multiple issues at both the guilt phase and penalty phase of trial: improper denial of two defense challenges for cause, error in denying defendant’s motion for a change of venue, error in denying defense counsel access to field notes used to refresh a state witness’ memory, and improper references to the defendant’s prior criminal record. On 04/30/92, the FSC affirmed the conviction, but vacated Gerald’s death sentence.

    On 03/26/93, a new jury recommended the death sentence by a vote of 12-0, and on 04/13/93, Geralds was resentenced to death.

    Geralds filed a Petition for Writ of Certiorari with the U.S. Supreme Court on 07/24/96 that was denied on 10/07/96.

    Geralds filed a 3.850 Motion with the Circuit Court on 09/22/97 and amended the Motion on 08/31/01 and 01/28/02. On 01/18/06, the Circuit Court denied the motion.

    Geralds filed a 3.850 Motion Appeal with the Florida Supreme Court on 04/24/06. The FSC affirmed the decision of the lower court on 09/16/10. Geralds filed a motion for rehearing on 10/01/10. That motion is pending.

    Geralds filed a Petition for Writ of Habeas Corpus with the Florida Supreme Court on 04/17/07, and it was denied on 09/16/10. Geralds filed a motion for rehearing on 10/01/10. That motion is pending.

    Geralds filed a Petition for Writ of Certiorari with the U.S. Supreme Court on 12/08/09 that was denied on 06/21/10.

  6. #6
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    MARK ALLEN GERALDS vs STATE OF FLORIDA

    Panama City Murderer Still Awaits Execution

    It was a gruesome murder that shocked the Cove neighborhood 23 years ago, and the man convicted of the crime will stay on Florida’s death row.

    Thursday morning, the Florida Supreme Court reaffirmed its denial of Mark Allen Geralds' motion to overturn his first-degree murder conviction.

    Geralds murdered Cove housewife Tressa Pettibone at her home in February 1989, in fact it was 23 years ago yesterday.

    The defense appealed saying the F-D-L-E crime lab testing notes were not made available to the original defense. But the court disagreed.

    Geralds remains on death row at Raiford Prison at Starke awaiting execution.

    http://www.wjhg.com/home/headlines/P...138601904.html

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    On April 29, 2013, Geralds filed a habeas petition in Federal District Court.

    http://dockets.justia.com/docket/flo...cv00167/71033/

  8. #8
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    3 convicted of murder appear in court

    All three were in court Friday morning looking for a second chance at life in the wake of the U.S. Supreme decision that upended Florida’s death penalty procedures.

    By ZACK McDONALD
    The Panama City News-Herald

    PANAMA CITY — The court docket Friday had a killer lineup.

    Three convicted killers, all of whom were once condemned to death for the murders of women, appeared in court to either ask for a chance at a lighter sentence under Florida’s revised capital punishment guidelines or to get an update on an upcoming resentencing.

    Roderick Orme, 55, raped and strangled to death Lisa Redd, a nurse, in a motel in 1992 because he was having a “bad high” after freebasing cocaine. Mark Allen Geralds, 50, left the beaten and stabbed body of Tressa Pettibone in 1989 for her 8-year-old son to discover in her kitchen after Geralds robbed the home. And Paul Glenn Everett, 38, broke into Kelli Bailey’s apartment in 2001 searching for money while “tripping” on LSD only to be confronted by Bailey, who he then beat, raped and left for dead.

    All three were in court Friday morning looking for a second chance at life in the wake of the U.S. Supreme decision that upended Florida’s death penalty procedures. The decision ultimately required Florida juries to be unanimous in recommendations for the death penalty and prevented judges from diverging from the verdict, both of which applied retroactively.

    Orme already has been awarded a new penalty phase by the Florida Supreme Court because he was condemned to death first by a margin of 7-5 and again by 11-1. He was appointed a public defender Friday to again argue against the death penalty, although a date for the hearing has yet to be set. Orme is scheduled to return to court Dec. 1 for a status conference.

    Geralds was first recommended for death by a margin of 8-4, but the verdict was reimposed by a unanimous jury. He is arguing the death penalty was an illegal sentence because the first jury failed to reach unanimity. Geralds’ case also is pending in the federal court. The court will issue an order at an unidentified date in the future, court records stated.

    Everett, however, was condemned to death by execution first by a margin of 12-0, but he still is arguing the sentence should be vacated under the U.S. Supreme Court ruling, saying among other things that the jury’s instructions were flawed when they went into deliberation.

    The Attorney’s General Office argued Everett’s case was unlike the others because the jury’s decision was unanimous and they found significant aggravating factors to condemn him to death.

    “This case involved the brutal beating, rape and murder of Kelli Bailey, during which she slowly suffocated to death after (Everett) broke her neck,” prosecutors wrote in their response. “The evidence in the case was overwhelming and included Everett’s confession and his DNA found on the victim’s body.”

    Everett’s case has yet to be scheduled for a follow-up hearing.

    The cases are among 11 first-degree murder death sentences in the 14th Judicial Circuit, which includes Bay County, being considered for a new penalty phase or proceeding toward one.

    http://www.newsherald.com/news/20170...ppear-in-court

  9. #9
    Administrator Aaron's Avatar
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    Don't ask questions, just consume product and then get excited for next products.

    "They will hurt you. They will hurt your grandma, these people. The root cause of this is there's no discipline in the homes, they don't go to school, you know, they live off the government, no personal accountability, and they just beat people up for no reason, and it's disgusting." - Former Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters

  10. #10
    Administrator Moh's Avatar
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    In today's orders, the United States Supreme Court declined to review Geralds' petition for certiorari.

    Lower Ct: Supreme Court of Florida
    Case Numbers: (SC17-1765)
    Decision Date: February 28, 2018

    https://www.supremecourt.gov/search....c/18-5376.html

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