The Florida Supreme Court on Thursday unanimously rejected an appeal by an inmate who challenged his death sentence after diagnoses of Autism Spectrum Disorder and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Attorneys for Floyd Damren, 72, pointed to 2021 conclusions by a psychologist that he had the disorders and argued that if a jury had heard the evidence, “there is a reasonable probability that the sentence would have been life.”
Damren, a Vietnam veteran, was sentenced to death in the 1994 murder of an employee of R.G.C. Mineral Sands in Clay County during a burglary.
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Though Thursday’s Supreme Court opinion did not provide details of the murder, earlier court documents said Damren bludgeoned the employee, Don Miller, with a steel pipe. In rejecting the arguments, the Supreme Court upheld a lower-court decision and said Damren’s “claims were facially insufficient and untimely.”
In part, justices disputed that the conditions could not have been diagnosed before a new psychologist, Marlyne Israelian, made the conclusions in 2021.
“Instead of enlightening the postconviction (lower) court or this (Supreme) Court as to when ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder) became diagnosable in adults so as to establish when Damren’s ASD and PTSD became discoverable by the exercise of due diligence, Damren seems to argue that regardless of when ASD became diagnosable in adults, no amount of diligence could have led to his diagnoses before June 10, 2021, because ASD was only diagnosed at that time by ‘chance,’ ‘happenstance,’ or ‘serendipity’ — due to the substitution of Dr. Israelian in place of the doctor who was supposed to have evaluated Damren in 2020 — and the PTSD could not be diagnosed until the ASD was diagnosed,” the opinion said. “We disagree.”
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