Angela Corey, the Florida State Attorney for the Fourth Judicial Circuit, whose jurisdiction included Duval County, which had the highest number of death sentences per capita in the nation, lost her reelection bid in the Republican primary late last month.
Corey, whom the Nation suggested could be “the cruelest prosecutor in America,” was trounced by Melissa Nelson, a former prosecutor, 64 percent to 26 percent.
Corey is probably best known for her aggressive prosecution of a woman who fired a gun into the air to scare off her abusive husband, charging the woman with aggravated assault and asking for a 60-year sentence after two trials. She was also criticized for her handling of the murder trial of George Zimmerman, who killed Trayvon Martin. Zimmerman was acquitted. And, she charged a 12-year-old boy with first degree murder as an adult, after he shoved his younger brother into a bookcase, causing the boy to suffer fatal head injuries.
But it was Corey’s zeal for the death penalty that made her really stand out. She has sentenced more people to death than any other prosecutor in Florida, with 24 capital convictions in her eight years as state attorney. Harvard’s Fair Penalty Project found that between 2010 and 2015, 25 percent of the state’s death sentences came from Duval County, which accounts for only five percent of Florida’s population. In addition, the report says that only three of the death sentences from Duval County that the Florida Supreme Court reviewed on direct appeal since 2006 were imposed by a unanimous jury.
A woman whose 20-year-old daughter, Shelby Farah, was killed during a robbery at her workplace in 2013, became a target of Corey’s when she publicly asked the state attorney not to pursue the death penalty against her daughter’s killer. Corey ignored Darlene Farah’s wishes, saying in a radio interview that Farah “appears to be more interested in publicity than actually grieving for her daughter.”
But while many criminal justice reformers, defense lawyers, abolitionists, and academics cheered Corey’s defeat, it remains to be seen whether or how much the state attorney’s office in the Fourth Circuit will change. Nelson, who is the new state attorney because no candidate is running against her in the general election in November, is a Republican, a career prosecutor, and was endorsed by the NRA.