- April 24, 2024
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David Beasher Snelgrove, sentenced to death in by an 8-4 jury vote after he was convicted in 2002 of the 2000 beating and stabbing deaths of his elderly Palm Coast neighbors, Glyn and Vivian Fowler, has appealed his death sentence multiple times.
He was back in court in Flagler County Tuesday, May 26, as his defense team attempted to convince Circuit Judge David Walsh to throw out his conviction and his death sentence and grant him a new trial and penalty phase.
Snelgrove, wearing the green and white jumpsuit of an inmate on death row, was largely expressionless throughout the hearing.
The victims’ children, Randy Fowler and Pamela Fowler Norko, traveled from their homes in California for the hearing.
Norko, who dabbed at her eyes with a tissue throughout the proceedings, said the repeated appeals — which have included two before the Florida Supreme Court — have been hard on the siblings.
“We went through the first trial back in 2002, then there was another hearing for the penalty phase, and we’ve been though two appeals in Tallahassee, and now this,” she said.
Her brother was also frustrated with the lengthy process.
“All they’re doing is pulling at straws trying to save him, after he murdered two wonderful people,” he said.
Norko said she is hoping Walsh, who will rule in the future after reviewing the case documents which must be submitted in the coming 30 days, will find for the prosecution.
“We will fight to the end,” she said.
She noted that her parents had been friendly with Snelgrove, who lived across the street from her parents. They’d loaned him money in the past.
But Snelgrove, then 27, broke into their home one night to steal money or jewelry to pawn to support a cocaine addiction.
“All he had to do was ask my dad, and my dad would have done anything for him, for anybody,” Norko said.
But when the couple awoke and interrupted Snelgrove’s burglary, he killed them, beating 84-year-old Glyn Fowler so brutally that he died of blunt force trauma to the head, according to Florida Supreme Court records. Vivian Fowler, 79, died of a stab wound to the heart, and both had “multiple fractures and stab wounds spread throughout their bodies,” according to the document.
Snelgrove pawned the couple’s jewelry and used their bloodstained cash to buy cocaine.
Detectives arrested him after a bloodhound tracked a scent trail to Snelgrove’s house, where “police recovered a knife in the woods next to the Snelgrove home with blood matching Snelgrove’s DNA,” according to the Florida Supreme Court document. There were blood droplets containing Snelgrove’s DNA throughout the Fowler home.
The Florida Supreme Court overturned Snelgrove’s sentence in 2005, then reversed itself in 2009, again sentencing Snelgrove to death. A subsequent hearing in 2013 also upheld the sentence. Most states with the death penalty require a unanimous jury recommendation to implement it.
In the hearing Tuesday, Snelgrove’s defense team, led by Tampa-based attorney Richard Kiley and attorney Ali Shakoor, made two claims of ineffective counsel during the trial: that Snelgrove’s counsel failed to address a possible mental disability that could have prevented him from being sentenced to death, and that Snelgrove’s defense team failed to object to improper comments by the prosecution.
Snelgrove’s lead counsel at the time of his trial, James Valerino, testified Tuesday that an initial IQ test administered to Snelgrove in jail showed an IQ of 77 — too high for Snelgrove to be considered what was, at the time, referred to as “mentally retarded.” The current term is “mentally disabled.”
A subsequent test found a score of 70, Valerino said. A score of 70 was, at the time, the very highest someone could have if they were to be considered mentally disabled.
Valerino said in the hearing Tuesday that he had requested a continuance from the judge at the time in order to pursue the possibility that Snelgrove was mentally retarded, but the motion was denied.
A forensic psychologist, Gregory Prichard, evaluated Snelgrove for the prosecution, judging him at the time to functioning at a “borderline” range of mental functioning that was not so low as to be considered mentally disabled. He'd evaluated Snelgrove's IQ as 75.
In court Tuesday responding to questions from the prosecution, Prichard noted that Snelgrove hadn’t been classed as intellectually disabled as a child. He’d instead been listed as emotionally disabled.
“When they’re saying it’s emotional, they’re essentially ruling out that it has anything to do with intellectual condition,” Prichard said.
And, he said, Snelgrove’s written communications from prison didn’t seem like that of someone with an intellectual disability, and people didn’t react to him as someone who was mentally disabled.
“In my mind, everything was consistently pointing that Mr. Snelgrove was functioning in a borderline intellectual range, not in a disabled range,” Prichard said.
Kiley asked Prichard if he had any way of knowing if other inmates had helped Snelgrove write the communications that Prichard had reviewed.
He did not.
Snelgrove’s current defense team also found a former employee of Snelgrove’s Miami-Dade county high school — Christine Mack —who had worked with Snelgrove when he was a child.
Valerino hadn’t done that, and Shakoor argued that he should have, and that his failure to do so constituted ineffective counsel and grounds for a retrial.
But Valerino, who came to court Tuesday with a cart loaded almost five feet high with file boxes full of case documents, said from the witness stand that he’d found no school documents listing Snelgrove as intellectually disabled.
Shakoor asked Valerino if he’d traveled to Miami or sent a special investigator there to look for a witness who could testify to Snelgrove’s intelligence.
After the continuance he’d requested was denied, Valerino replied, “We did not have time to find a witness when we were in the middle of the penalty phase.”
Shakoor argued that Valerino could have sent a special investigator to Miami to look for witnesses who’d provide mitigating information, and that fact that he hadn’t — and that he had not objected to statements made by prosecutor and former State Attorney John Tanner in openeing and closing arguments, when Tanner told the jury that Vivian Fowler hadn’t run away the night of her murder because she’d been with her husband too long to flee, and that she must have known what was coming — constituted ineffective counsel.
“These were objectionable matters,” Shakoor said of Tanner’s statements. “The first two statements … were an example of Mr. Tanner inflaming the jury by getting in the mind of the victim.”
The defense team questioned Mack Tuesday through a video link to the courtroom.
She testified that she’d seen Snelgrove regularly, though not frequently, when she was an ESE program specialist at Miami Central Senior High School, which he attended.
“Mr. Snelgrove, I remember, was a tall skinny young man,” she said. “He was pleasant, he was not a disruptive student. He did have a tendency to be truant.”
Shakoor noted that many of Snelgrove’s school records — such as possible IQ tests that might establish mental disability before the age of 18, a potential mitigating factor in his case — had been destroyed by the Miami-Dade County School District by the time of his trial.
He asked Tanner if it was possible for students who’ been classed as emotionally disabled for ESE classes to also have an intellectual disability.
It was possible, Mack said, though common. When Snelgrove was in high school, she said, it wasn’t possible for students to double up on ESE programs. “On occasion there were other conditions, but the students were placed based on what was the best setting for them at that time,” she said.
But Snelgrove wasn’t able to take regular courses, and was instead on an alternate diploma course, available only to students whose reading level in high school was below the fourth grade level.
“He could not be mainstreamed into the regular academic classes,” she said.
Mack said in response to Shakoor’s questions that she would have been willing to testify at previous hearings.
“As a lay witness, Ms. Mack’s testimony could have been very beneficial for Mr. Snelgrove,” Shakoor said. “Mr. Snelgrove’s lay witnesses were mostly family members or close friends. ...But as a juror, they’re going to see somebody testifying for a family member, they’re not going to take it … with possibly the same level of scrutiny as they would with somebody who was a non-relative, who’s an education professional. …Triall counsel, he had no reason for not finding Ms. Mack.”
Kiley said Mack’s testimony satisfied the need for evidence that Snelgrove had an intellectual disability before the age of 18, despite the destruction of some of his school records before the trial.
“The only records that could save this man’s life have been destroyed,” Kiley said. “This man was never going to graduate from high school like a normal person; he was reading at a fourth grade level when he was in the 9th grade. …Evidence of onset under the age of 18 had now been satisfied.”
Attorney Scott Browne, arguing the case for the State Attorney General’s Office, said that wasn’t the case.
“Did you see the number of boxes in here, your honor?” he said to Walsh. “Did that seem like an attorney who took his job lightly in this case? These defense attorneys left no stone unturned. …Was (Mack’s) testimony inconsistent with anything understood at the time? The answer is no.”
And the comments by Tanner during the trial also weren’t grounds for scrapping it and starting over, he said.
“Mr. Snelgrove received a death sentence not because of any brief comment by Mr. Tanner — he did it because he committed two heinous and atrocious, cruel murders,” he said. “Nothing that has occurred in this courtroom should undermine the confidence in the death sentence that Mr. Snelgrove received for committing two murders in this case.”
