ORLANDO, Fla. – Markeith Loyd, the Orlando man convicted of killing a police lieutenant in 2017, will remain on death row after the Florida Supreme Court upheld his convictions and death sentence.
The high court issued its ruling Thursday.
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Loyd was sentenced to death in March 2022 for the murder of Orlando police Lt. Debra Clayton. Loyd appealed, raising 13 challenges to his convictions and death sentence ranging from jury instructions to complaints about closing arguments made by prosecutors to whether Loyd was competent to proceed with the trial.
Loyd also tried to argue that since Florida law excludes felons from serving on a jury, that violates the equal protection clause of the United States Constitution, and that the state’s death penalty law violates the Constitution as well.
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The justices rejected all of Loyd’s arguments, except one.
The court did agree with Loyd about the use of music over a slide presentation featuring pictures of Clayton presented during the penalty phase of the trial. The defense objected to the use of music because it had no connection to the victim, but the judge overruled the objection.
The Supreme Court ruled the trial court abused its discretion, but said the error did not automatically justify a reversal of the sentence.
“Loyd ‘acknowledges that the montage was not maudlin[ ] and was not exploited by the State in argument,’” the court wrote.
Loyd is also serving a life sentence for the murder of ex-girlfriend Sade Dixon and her unborn child in 2016. He was on the run for that crime when he shot Clayton in a Walmart parking lot in January 2017.
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