TALLAHASSEE , Fla. – A Marion County circuit judge has refused to vacate a death sentence for a convicted murderer scheduled to be executed this month, rejecting arguments that a new law compensating victims of abuse at the notorious Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys should give the case a fresh review.
Judge Robert Hodges’ ruling Thursday likely will set off a flurry of appeals in the runup to the scheduled Aug. 29 execution of Loran Cole, who has spent three decades on Death Row for the 1994 murder of a Florida State University student who went camping with his sister in the Ocala National Forest.
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Lawyers for Cole, 57, for years futilely have argued that abuse he suffered at Dozier, a now-shuttered reform school in Marianna, contributed to his criminal behavior.
A law signed this year by Gov. Ron 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.
“If Cole’s jury had known about the severe abuse that happened at Dozier, and Florida’s willingness to acknowledge the severe problems at Dozier to the extent that designated victims are entitled to reparations, there is a reasonable probability the newly discovered evidence would yield a less severe sentence,” Cole’s lawyers wrote in a motion filed Saturday.
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.
“The court finds that although (the) defendant is using a different argument, he is attempting to relitigate the same issue he raised in two prior motions. But ‘resolutions, consensus opinions, articles, research, and the like, do not constitute newly discovered evidence,’” Hodges wrote, pointing to a 2023 Florida Supreme Court decision in another death-penalty case.
According to court filings, Cole’s suppressed memories of his experiences at Dozier resurfaced more than a decade ago after he watched a documentary about abuse at the school.
Cole said he was raped by a guard, beaten at least twice a week and had both of his legs broken by staff after trying to escape during his six-month stint at Dozier, where he was sent at age 17, court documents dating back more than a decade said.
“That horrible place helped create the Loran Cole who sits on death row today,” his lawyers argued in an appeal filed at the Florida Supreme Court in 2011.
Cole’s argument that the Dozier compensation law presented new evidence was “procedurally barred,” Hodges wrote in Thursday’s 14-page ruling.
“The harsh conditions at the Dozier School were exposed long ago. The state of Florida’s decision to now compensate some of those individuals who attended the school does not revive (the) defendant’s previously denied postconviction claims,” the judge wrote.
Cole was sentenced to death in the February 1994 murder of John Edwards, who went to the Ocala National Forest to camp with his sister, a student at Eckerd College, court records show.
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.)
Hodges’ ruling Thursday also rejected other arguments made by Cole’s lawyers seeking to vacate the death sentence, including a challenge to the state’s lethal-injection procedure.
Cole’s lawyers maintained that, because he has Parkinson’s disease that causes involuntary body movements, placing intravenous lines to administer the triple-drug lethal-injection cocktail will be “very difficult, needlessly painful, and unreasonably dangerous.”
But Hodges found that claim to be “untimely,” writing that Cole has had Parkinson’s disease for at least seven years and had not raised the issue until the warrant was signed.
DeSantis ordered Cole’s execution on July 29, weeks after the Dozier compensation law went into effect. The measure set aside $20 million to compensate people who attended Dozier and another state reform school between 1940 and 1975 and “who were subjected to mental, physical or sexual abuse perpetrated by school personnel.”
Cole, who attended the school in 1984, would not be eligible for compensation. He would be the first inmate executed in Florida since October, when Michael Duane Zack was put to death by lethal injection for a 1996 murder in Escambia County.
Death-penalty opponents have rallied around the Dozier issue as they call for Cole’s execution to be scrapped.
“The state of Florida was complicit in creating the Loran Cole who ultimately committed this murder. The state of Florida now has a duty to end the cycle of violence that it started by commuting his sentence to life without the possibility of parole,” Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty Executive Director Maria DeLiberato told the News Service this week.