Florida death row inmate Donald Smith appeared in court this week for an evidentiary hearing, in an attempt to reverse his murder conviction, in connection with the 2013 death of Cherish Perrywinkle.
As CrimeOnline previously reported, Smith was convicted in 2018 and sentenced to death for kidnapping 8-year-old Cherish from a Jacksonville Walmart. He then raped and killed her before tossing her body in a creek, behind the Highlands Baptist Church in Jacksonville.
He returned to court this week in Duval County for a “post-conviction relief,” The Florida Times-Union reports.
Smith’s attempt in 2021 to get the sentence overturned was shut down by the Florida Supreme Court unanimously “upheld his conviction and sentence,” The Florida Times-Union reports.
In the Supreme Court appeal, Smith’s legal team argued that, due to extensive pretrial publicity, the trial should have been relocated from Duval County. They also contended that jurors should not have been permitted to view autopsy photos.
In court Tuesday, Smith’s defense lawyer, Julie Schlax, said the initial jury members were not adequately screened. This claim arose during the jury selection process when a prospective juror initially answered “yes” to having her own opinion about Smith’s guilt. She later crossed it out and replaced it with “no.”
“Counsel was ineffective for failing to identify, interrogate, and strike a biased juror, despite having been alerted to the prospective juror’s bias in the pre-selection questionnaire,” court records indicate.
The defense also said that calling a clinical psychologist as a witness for the defense during Smith’s trial exposed her to cross-examination, leading to the introduction of detrimental testimony during the penalty phase, which the jurors heard.
“This included her inflammatory, and seemingly biased, description of Mr. Smith as ‘the most dangerous pedophile she had ever met,’ alongside her extremely damning conclusion that Mr. Smith had no available mitigation available to present on his behalf,” court documents read.
Prosecutors argued that the psychologist’s testimony was “necessary to establish the mitigation that the State failed the victim by releasing the Defendant from prison instead of committing him in a Jimmy Ryce proceeding.”
Watch the full hearing below
At the time of his arrest for the murder, Smith was a convicted sex offender who had been out of jail for around three weeks before he preyed upon the Perrywinkle family.
The judge said the outcome of Tuesday’s hearing could take days or even months for a decision. Check back for updates.
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[Feature Photo: Cherish Perrywinkle/Handout]
