Joseph Zielera murderer convicted of killing an 11-year-old girl and her nanny more than three decades ago, was sentenced to death this Monday by a judge in southwest Florida.
Before knowing his sentence, the prisoner managed to cajole his lawyer and elbow him in the face as he approached to have a dialogue with his client.
Immediately, two court bailiffs threw Zieler to the ground, according to the video shared by NBC Miami.
The incident occurred seconds after Zieler entered the lee county courtroom and signaled to his lawyer, Kevin Shirley, as if indicating to him to come over and exchange a few words in private.
Once he was at his side and they put their heads together to speak in each other’s ears, the assassin dropped an elbow right in Shirley’s face. Despite having his hands handcuffed, the convict managed to make a movement with her body and, raising his elbow, hit his lawyer’s face.
Zieler was sentenced to death for the 1990 murder of an 11-year-old girl and her nanny in Cape Coral. According to NBCthe two victims were found in an apartment with signs of having been sexually assaulted.
The girl’s mother had been out overnight and discovered the suffocated bodies when she returned the next morning.
Zieler hoped to get a new trial, but the judge dismissed the motion and did not vacate the conviction, thus his case could constitute the fifth death sentence signed by the Governor of Florida, Ron DeSantisso far in 2023.
Last month, 10 of 12 jurors recommended that Zieler be sentenced to death after about five hours of deliberations, according to court records. The same jury previously found Zieler, 60, guilty of two counts of first-degree murder in the 1990 murders of Robin Cornell11 years old, and Lisa Story32 years old.
After the incident, Shirley said that she was fine. “I had no idea she was going to do something like this,” she said. “She’s obviously been planning that. But as she went down, she said she was sorry she failed,” the lawyer said, acknowledging that she had boxed in the past.
In previous hearings, Zieler shocked the courtroom by claiming that he had slept with Cornell’s mother a few months before the murder. “I thought the only way my DNA could have gotten there was because I slept with Jan Cornell“, said.
Zieler was arrested on an assault charge in 2016. That’s when his DNA matched the unsolved murders of Cornell and Story, authorities said.
In Monday’s – where his death sentence was upheld – the killer yelled at the jury and made vulgar gestures while on the witness stand. “His conduct of his on the stand did not help,” said his other attorney, Lee Hollander. “If you’re in a hole, stop digging,” she concluded.
In mid-June, it was making headlines that Florida would execute one of the oldest inmates on death row in the state, a man convicted of two murders and rapes in 1984.
It was about Duane Eugene Owen (62 years old), convicted in 1986 for the murder of two women in 1984. In March of that year, he stabbed several times and raped Karen Slatterya 14-year-old nanny while the two little ones in her care slept.
In May of that same year, he attacked in Boca Raton with a hammer Georgianna Bea 38-year-old mother of two, and raped her while the children were sleeping.
