FLORIDA – An evidentiary hearing was held Monday for a man facing execution for murdering two people in 1993 in Duval County.
As first reported by The Tributary, Michael Bell’s attorneys claim in a new appeal that two witnesses lied on the witness stand – and that they were induced to do so by a Jacksonville detective with ties to a different controversial case.
Motions filed last week accused retired prosecutor George Bateh and JSO Detective Bolena of offering favors to the witnesses in exchange for their false testimony.
But at a hearing at a Duval County court on Monday, both those witnesses pleaded the Fifth multiple times when pressed by the attorneys.
The legal team representing Bell submitted handwritten affidavits from both witnesses, each saying he was coached to give false testimony by Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office Detective William Bolena.
The prosecutor objected to the admissibility of the affidavit on Monday.
Two of the witnesses who took the stand Monday invoked the Fifth Amendment, which protects against self-incrimination, during some questions.
Gov. Ron DeSantis on Friday signed a death warrant for Bell, 54, setting the stage for a potentially record-tying eighth execution this year.
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The execution was scheduled for July 15 at Florida State Prison, according to information posted on the state Supreme Court website.
If the state puts Bell to death by lethal injection and carries out a scheduled June 24 execution of Thomas Gudinas, it would match the most executions in a year since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976 after a U.S. Supreme Court decision had halted it. Florida also executed eight inmates in 1984 and 2014, a Florida Department of Corrections list shows.
On Tuesday morning, a Duval County judge is expected to decide whether Bell should have his 1995 conviction and death sentence thrown out. He is currently scheduled to be executed in 3 weeks.
The judge is expected to decide by 11:00 a.m.
Bell was sentenced to death in the December 1993 shooting deaths of Jimmy West and Tamecka Smith outside a Jacksonville bar, according to court documents. Bell was found guilty of using an AK-47 rifle to shoot the pair as they got into a car.
The documents from past Florida Supreme Court and U.S. Supreme Court appeals said Bell was seeking revenge for the death of his brother, who had been killed by West’s half-brother earlier in 1993.
The Department of Corrections website said Bell also is serving 25-year sentences on three second-degree murder charges unrelated to the shooting outside the bar. One of those cases involved the 1989 murders of a Jacksonville mother and her 2-year-old son.
Additionally, Bell was sent to Florida’s notorious Dozier School for Boys, where, according to motions, he was sexually assaulted by a guard. His aunt said Monday on the stand that he was never the same after coming back from the institution.
Friday’s death warrant came three days after the state executed Anthony Wainwright, who was convicted of kidnapping a woman in 1994 from a Winn-Dixie supermarket parking lot in Lake City and raping and murdering her in rural Hamilton County.
DeSantis on May 23 also signed a death warrant for Gudinas, who was convicted in the May 1994 murder of Michelle McGrath, who had been out for a night of entertainment in downtown Orlando. McGrath’s body was found about 7:30 a.m. in an alley and had been “savagely raped and severely beaten by the defendant with a blunt instrument,” a circuit judge wrote in sentencing Gudinas.
Gudinas’ attorneys have asked the Florida Supreme Court to halt the execution, though justices had not ruled as of early Friday evening.
The state this year also executed Glen Rogers on May 15; Jeffrey Hutchinson on May 1; Michael Tanzi on April 8; Edward James on March 20; and James Ford on Feb. 13.
Meanwhile, the state put to death one inmate in 2024 and six in 2023. It did not execute anyone in 2020, 2021 and 2022, the Department of Corrections list shows.
