State makes it official: No death penalty for former gangster and convicted murderer
Miami-Dade prosecutors made it official this week, telling a judge the state will no longer move forward with its death penalty phase in the trial of a former gangland leader and convicted murderer Corey Smith.
At a brief hearing before Miami-Dade Circuit Court Judge Andrea Ricker Wolfson on Wednesday, the state said it studied the more than two-decades-old case and determined too much time had passed and too many witnesses had dried up or died to try to successfully re-litigate.
Wolfson then gave the state and Smith’s defense attorney Allison Miller until the first week in February to come up with a plea deal. She told attorneys that if a deal wasn’t in place by then, she’d likely set up a hearing date for the defense motion to vacate the murder charges against Smith.
The Miami Herald first reported the state’s plan to stop moving forward with Smith’s death penalty on Sunday.
READ MORE: State no longer seeking death penalty in trial of convicted gang leader and murderer
Smith was convicted in federal court of drug and firearm charges in 1999. He was indicted by a Miami-Dade grand jury a year later on 17 counts for crimes committed in connection with Liberty City’s violent John Doe drug gang. The group got its name from the toe tags tied to unidentified bodies at the morgue.
Miami-Dade jurors found Smith guilty of six murders. The high-profile case, in which Smith was forced to wear a stun belt each day to nix any escape attempt, launched the careers of some young prosecutors. A year later, Smith was sentenced to death in two of the cases.
But the case remained tied up in a court system that changed its rules regarding the death penalty several times. The sentencing phase of Smith’s trial was order re-tried in 2016 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Florida’s death sentence law unconstitutional and said a unanimous jury was required before meting out a death penalty sentence.
That was upended after the Parkland high school mass shooting two years later. By 2023, after convicted shooter Nikolas Cruz’s life was spared by jurors, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a new law in the state that only required a two-thirds majority of jurors to impose a death sentence.
Re-sentencing, however, was still required. And not long after Smith’s began earlier this year, Wolfson became incensed after learning of jailhouse phone calls between the lead prosecutor and a state’s witness, in an apparent attempt to use a snitch in the jail to shore up stories between potential witnesses.
She removed lead prosecutor Michael Von Zamft, who would soon retire. And also dismissed co-counsel Stephen Mitchell, she said, for his vigorous defense of Von Zamft.
Other convictions tied to the same jailhouse informant soon unraveled. In July, the murder conviction and life sentence of Taji Pearson was vacated. He’s expected to be released next summer.
And Jimmy Washington, convicted on the testimony of the same jailhouse informant, is also seeking to have his conviction and sentence tossed. Both were involved in the 2010 murder of a 15-year-old, Sabrina O’Neil.
