DC# 044049
DOB: 09/01/53 

Eighth Judicial Circuit, Alachua County, Case #77-2332 CF
Sentencing Judge: The Honorable John J. Crews
Resentencing Judge: The Honorable Robert P. Cates
Trial Attorney: Stephen Bernstein – Assistant Public Defender   
Attorney, Direct Appeal: Stephen Bernstein – Assistant Public Defender
Attorney, Resentencing Direct Appeal: David A. Davis – Assistant Public Defender
Attorney, Collateral Appeals: Jeffrey Hazen – Registry

Date of Offense: 11/09/77

Date of Sentence: 10/20/78

Date of Resentencing: 06/25/98

Circumstances of Offense: 

Stephen Todd Booker was convicted and sentenced to death for the murder of 94-year-old Lorine Demoss Harmon on 11/09/77.

The elderly victim was found in her Gainesville apartment with two large knives embedded in her body.  Medical examiners reported the cause of death as being a loss of blood due to numerous stab wounds in upper body region. 

Medical examiners also discovered blood and semen in the victim’s vaginal tract, concluding that sexual intercourse had taken place prior to the murder.  Harmon’s apartment appeared to be thoroughly searched, dresser drawers were pulled out and their contents scattered about.

Investigators recovered fingerprints, footprints and hair at the crime scene that linked Booker to the murder. After his arrest, Booker began speaking as an alternate personality named “Aniel.”  Upon questioning, Aniel implicated Stephen (Booker) in the crimes.

Additional Information: 

Booker was convicted of robbery in 1974 and was on “Mandatory Conditional Release” when he murdered Harmon.  Following his murder conviction, Booker was charged and convicted of aggravated battery for burning a correctional officer at Florida State Prison in 1981.  On 06/08/81, he was sentenced to 15 years for that offense.

Booker’s sanity was in question from the time he was arrested through the trial proceedings.  The court appointed numerous psychiatrists to examine Booker, and he was found to be sane when he committed the murder and competent to stand trial.  Booker was not diagnosed with Dissociative Identity Disorder (formerly known as Multiple Personality Disorder), and experts believe that the “Aniel” alternate personality Booker displayed after arrest was fabricated, self-serving behavior.

Trial Summary:

11/10/77          Defendant arrested.

12/02/77          Defendant indicted on:

Count I:           First-Degree Murder

Count II:          Sexual Battery

Count III:         Burglary

12/13/77          Defendant entered a plea of “not guilty” on all counts.

06/21/78          The jury found the defendant guilty on all counts.

06/22/78          Upon advisory sentencing, the jury, by a 9 to 3 majority, voted for the death penalty. 

10/20/78          The defendant was sentenced as followed:

Count I:           First-Degree Murder - Death

Count II:          Sexual Battery – 55 years

Count III:         Burglary - 30 years

01/14/91          The United States Court of Appeals for the 11^th Circuit affirmed the District Court’s decision to grant Booker’s Petition for Writ of Habeas Corpus, and his case was remanded for resentencing.

03/27/98          Upon advisory sentencing, the new jury, by an 8 to 4 majority, voted for the death penalty.

06/25/98          The defendant was resentenced as followed:

Count I:           First-Degree Murder - Death

Count II:          Sexual Battery – 55 years

Count III:         Burglary – 30 years

Case Information:

On 11/21/78, Booker filed his initial Direct Appeal in the Florida Supreme Court.  In the appeal, Booker argued that the court erred during the penalty phase when it allowed the prosecutor to ask incriminating questions based on privileged information from psychiatric reports.  He also contended that the court erred in permitting a prejudicial and graphic photograph of the victim to be introduced as evidence.  Booker sought the reversal of his conviction of burglary and claimed that the trial court erred in its application of non-statutory aggravating factors.  The Florida Supreme Court affirmed the convictions and sentence of death on 03/19/81 and the mandate was issued on 08/14/81. 

On 07/20/81, Booker filed a Petition for Writ of Certiorari in the United States Supreme Court, which was denied on 10/19/81.

The defendant then filed a Motion to Vacate Judgment and Sentence (3.850) in the Circuit Court on 04/13/82.  Booker contended there were revelations in the case based on new conclusions drawn by a psychiatrist that he suffered from a psychiatric disease at the time of the murder.  That motion was subsequently denied on 04/14/82, after which, Booker filed an appeal in the Florida Supreme Court on 04/15/82.  On 04/19/82, the Florida Supreme Court issued its opinion affirming the denial of the 3.850.

Booker proceeded to file a Petition for Writ of Habeas Corpus and an application for stay of execution in the United States District Court, Northern District, on 04/13/82.  The District Court denied the stay orally on 04/19/82 and the petition on 04/20/82.  Next, Booker filed an appeal of the denial of his Petition for Writ of Habeas Corpus in the United States Court of Appeals for the 11^th Circuit on 04/19/82.  Booker contended that his right against self-incrimination was not upheld when prosecutors presented privileged information from psychiatric reports during the penalty phase of the trial.  Booker also argued that the introduction of his prior violent behavior as evidence allowed the jury to consider non-statutory aggravating factors.  At the same time, the court limited the non-statutory mitigating circumstances that the jury heard.  The United States Court of Appeals for the 11^th Circuit affirmed the denial of the Petition for Writ of Habeas Corpus on 04/25/83.

The defendant again filed a Petition for Writ of Certiorari in the United States Supreme Court on 08/01/83.  The petition was denied on 10/17/83 

Booker filed a 3.850 Motion and an application for a stay of execution in the State Circuit Court on 11/08/83.  On 11/14/83 an evidentiary hearing was held to explore Booker’s claim of ineffective counsel.  The motion was denied on 11/16/83.  The defendant appealed the denial of his 3.850 Motion in the Florida Supreme Court on 11/15/83.  The Florida Supreme court affirmed the denial of the 3.850 Appeal and the stay of execution on 11/17/83.  Booker concurrently filed a Petition for Writ of Habeas Corpus and a Petition for Writ of Mandamus, which were also denied on 11/17/83.

On 11/16/83, Booker filed another Petition for Writ of Habeas Corpus in the United States District Court, Northern District.  The petition was denied on 04/17/84, after which Booker filed an appeal of that decision in the United States Court of Appeals for the 11^th Circuit on 05/07/84.  The court deemed Booker’s claim of ineffective counsel to be an abuse of writ because he purposefully delayed the assertion when it could have been introduced in his first petition.  Several other claims were barred by procedural default, as they, too, should have been brought up in Booker’s Direct Appeal in the Florida Supreme Court.  The United States Court of Appeal for the 11^th Circuit affirmed the denial of the Petition for Writ of Habeas Corpus on 06/21/85. 

A Petition for Writ of Certiorari was filed on 09/25/85 and subsequently denied on 11/04/85. 

Booker then submitted a request to reopen his second 3.850 Motion and an application for a stay of execution in the State Circuit Court on 09/26/85.  The court granted an evidentiary hearing to consider reopening Booker’s motion and a stay on 09/26/85. 

Booker implored the State Circuit Court to reopen his second 3.850 Motion, which claimed ineffectiveness of counsel.  Booker insisted that the court re-examine the case because the decision they reached was based upon false information.  The trial court held an evidentiary hearing on 01/10/86, and concluded that Booker could not adequately prove that fraud was committed upon the court.  The trial court also noted that the filing of successive motions without introducing any new claims constituted abuse of post-conviction relief.  The court, therefore, denied all relief on 01/27/86.  The defendant then appealed the decision not to reopen his second 3.850 Motion to the Florida Supreme Court on 01/29/86.  The Florida Supreme Court affirmed the denial of relief on 01/05/87.  

Booker again filed a Petition for Writ of Habeas Corpus in the United States District Court, Northern Circuit, on 02/25/86.  Booker also filed action pursuant to Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 60(b).  Booker asked the court to vacate the denials of his first and second federal habeas petitions in lieu of fraudulent testimony given by Stephen Bernstein, the defendant’s prior attorney.  The court denied Booker’s petition on 05/22/86.  Booker swiftly filed an appeal of the decision in the United States Court of Appeals for the 11^th Circuit on 06/24/86.  Since Booker could not convincingly prove that Bernstein lied to the court, the United States Court of Appeals agreed with the District Court’s finding that Booker’s third Petition for Writ of Habeas Corpus was indeed an abuse of writ.  The court affirmed the denial of relief on 08/05/87.

Booker filed his second state Habeas Petition in the Florida Supreme Court on 07/29/87.  Booker petitioned that he was entitled to relief because the jury was not instructed to consider non-statutory mitigating factors during advisory sentencing proceedings.  The Florida Supreme Court ruled that even though the jury was not given proper instruction regarding the consideration of non-statutory mitigating evidence, such an error was harmless in light of the numerous statutory aggravating circumstances.  The Florida Supreme Court denied the Petition for Writ of Habeas Corpus on 01/14/88.

On 02/22/88, Booker filed Petition for Writ of Certiorari in the United States Supreme Court from the United States Circuit Court of Appeals for the 11^th Circuit.  The petition was denied on 04/18/88.

On 03/18/88, Booker filed another Petition for Writ of Certiorari in the United States Supreme Court from the Florida Supreme Court.  That petition was denied on 06/13/88.

On 06/13/88, the defendant filed an additional Petition or Writ of Habeas Corpus in the United States District Court, Northern District.  Booker believed he was entitled to relief under Hitchcock v. Dugger.  Specifically, Booker claimed that a Hitchcock error was committed during the penalty phase of his trial when the prosecutor informed the jury that they were only to consider statutory mitigating circumstances.  Booker also contended that his defense counsel would have presented even more mitigating evidence on his behalf had his counsel not believed that the law limited them to statutory evidence.  The United States District Court, Northern District, found the Hitchcock error not to be harmless, as there was no way of predicting what a jury would have recommended if they had heard all mitigating circumstances.  The court granted the Petition for Writ of Habeas Corpus on 09/16/88.  On 09/16/88, the State filed an appeal of the District Court’s ruling in the United States Court of Appeals for the 11^th Circuit.  The court affirmed the District Court’s granting of Booker’s Habeas Petition on 01/14/91.

On 05/14/91, the State filed a Petition for Writ of Certiorari in the United States Supreme Court.  The petition was denied on 10/07/91.

On 04/29/93, the State filed an independent action in the United States District Court, Northern District, pursuant to Federal Rule of Procedure 60(b) urging the court to vacate its judgment and reinstate Booker’s death sentence.  They argued that due to the change in law under Brecht, the State’s burden of proof had been met.  The court denied the State’s request on 03/21/94, citing that the requirements for granting a motion under Federal Rule of Procedure 60(b) demand “extraordinary circumstances,” and Booker’s case did not meet such requirements.  The State appealed this ruling in the United States Court of Appeals for the 11^th Circuit on 04/22/94.  The court affirmed the denial of relief pursuant to Federal Rule of Procedure 60(b) on 07/17/96.

On 06/25/98, after a new penalty phase before a new jury, Stephen Booker was again sentenced to death for the 11/09/77 murder of Lorine Demoss Harmon.

After resentencing, Booker filed his Direct Appeal in the Florida Supreme Court on 07/13/98.  Booker argued that the court erred by failing to instruct the jury on the consecutive sentences he must serve due to prior convictions.  Booker also asserted that the State used a peremptory to discriminatorily remove a potential black woman from the new jury.  Lastly, Booker claimed that the death penalty was disproportional in his case, and that to execute him after having spent 20-plus years on death row would constitute cruel and unusual punishment.  On 10/05/00 the Florida Supreme Court affirmed the new death sentence imposed by the State Circuit Court.

Booker filed a Petition for Writ of Certiorari in the United States Supreme Court on 02/28/01.  The petition was denied on 05/14/01.

On 09/26/01, Booker filed a 3.850 Motion to Vacate Judgment and Sentence in the State Circuit Court and amended the motion on 05/18/04 and 01/18/05.  An Evidentiary Hearing was held on 09/16/05, and the motion was denied on 12/01/05.

Booker filed a 3.850 Motion Appeal in the Florida Supreme Court on 01/20/06 that is pending. 

Floridacapitalcases.state.fl.us

A Poet's Spirit Springs to Life on Death Row

By Bruce Weber - The New York Times

March 9, 2004

RAIFORD, Fla. — Stephen Todd Booker, who at 50 has been on death row for more than half his life, was explaining how his imagination kept working without the stimuli that most people take for granted. "I remember thinking one time — I'd already been here a while — and I realized I hadn't seen a star in 12 years," he said in an interview at the Union Correctional Institution here. "And I started to wonder about them, thinking they'd changed or something, and I wrote this poem imagining stars but from the perspective of a bat."

As a prison poet, a man whose creative spirit was set free by his body's confinement, Mr. Booker is in some ways a familiar American archetype. But unlike some jailhouse writers who have become celebrated causes (the murderer Jack Henry Abbott comes to mind), he has never been well known. He is, however, an indisputably accomplished poet whose work has appeared in top-level literary publications like The Kenyon Review, Seneca Review and Field, and has been championed by poets like Denise Levertov and Hayden Carruth.

"I'd have to say that anyone who has done 10 really glorious poems, and he's approaching that number, is a serious member of the inner sanctum," said Stuart Friebert, a former editor of Field who is retired from the creative writing department of Oberlin College. What is so exciting about Mr. Booker's work, he said, is that while there are poets who have influenced it — Gwendolyn Brooks is one — his combination of vernacular and formal language, and his perspective on the world give him a singular voice.

Having lived for 26 years under the threat of execution — a literal sword of Damocles — Mr. Booker can be seen as a case history: the criminal artist. Naturally gifted and emotionally tormented, he is an autodidact who did not take up the serious writing of poetry until after he went to prison and who has developed his craft entirely within a life of extreme circumscription.

The poem Mr. Booker was speaking about, "I, When a Bumblebee Bat," appeared in his book "Tug" (Wesleyan University Press, 1994), and like much of his often difficult work it contorts syntax with startling facility, deftly maneuvers the tools of prosody and leaps boldly from image to image as if laying down a challenge to the reader to follow him. Also characteristic, it echoes with the pangs of isolation:

Only twice in twelve long years
Has the Self in me transformed
To weighing less than a cent,
And blended with the evening,
Or heard ringing in my ears,
Or seen a star do its thing,
Umbrellaed aloft on air.
Swooping into a huge swarm
Of mosquitoes and gnats, there,
On velvety wings, I went
Gliding and eating until
Chilled to my buoyant marrow,
Convinced not to eat my fill,
To leave some for tomorrow.

To be clear: Mr. Booker's is not a romantic story, not a redemption story. He is a murderer, and his crime was especially despicable. On Nov. 9, 1977, evidently in a rage fueled by drugs and alcohol, he sexually attacked and stabbed to death Lorine Demoss Harmon in her Gainesville apartment, less than an hour from here in north-central Florida. She was 94.

Sentenced to death 11 months later, Mr. Booker is still alive because of a confusing welter of motions and appeals that in 1988 led to a United States District Court judge remanding the case for resentencing. Another decade passed before that resentencing happened, and by then several of Mr. Booker's literary supporters, as well as some of his victim's relatives, asked that he be allowed to live out his natural life in prison. But once again a jury voted to execute him. That sentence is being appealed.

"I won't be able to write fast enough, long enough, voluminously enough to make up for the stuff I've done," Mr. Booker admitted.

His story does, however, raise questions about poetry (what is it? what is it worth?) and poets (who are they? what do they need?), and about the value of individual lives and capital punishment. Mr. Carruth, who has never met Mr. Booker but whose correspondence with him goes back 20 years, said in an interview, "He's an intelligent guy, a talented guy, and intelligent and talented guys are not to be wasted."

Mr. Booker's story also yields a glimpse into a world — death row — that few people experience and maybe no other successful poet has to draw on. He almost spits his words when he speaks of the seemingly ever-changing rules of the prison and what he sees as the ever-increasing indignities of prison life, some as small as the fact that prisoners are no longer allowed writing implements other than finger-size flexible pens, which they must buy.

He clearly lives with intense stress, "not knowing whether they're going to whack you or what," he said. "That's an everyday thought, whether they're going to snuff you."

In addition to his poems Mr. Booker has written a volume of cabalistic biblical interpretation and a breathless autobiography. He is also a prolific letter writer, and as his correspondents attest, he can betray a frightening anger in his letters.

He is always on his guard. A year after the murder, when Page Zyromski, the great-niece of the woman Mr. Booker killed, wrote to him to say she forgave him, he wrote back, Ms. Zyromski said, asking, "What are you, some kind of goody-two-shoes?"

"I wrote back to him, `I guess I am a goody-two-shoes,' " said Ms. Zyromski, 61, a religious writer and retired teacher who has visited Mr. Booker in prison several times from her home in Painesville, Ohio.

The interview with Mr. Booker would ordinarily have been conducted in a small cell with a pane of thick glass separating him from a reporter, but because of a power failure at the prison the interview took place in a common room where there was sufficient light.

Wearing an orange jumpsuit and white sneakers, Mr. Booker, trim and fit looking with hints of gray at his temples and a receding hairline, was led into the room with his wrists and ankles shackled. His lawyer, Harry P. Brody, was present, as were four armed guards, 20 feet or so away.

The interview lasted about 90 minutes, and Mr. Booker revealed the crafty, aggressive intelligence that is apparent in his poems and a fierce pride in his abilities. As he does when he writes, in conversation he uses a vividly amalgamated vocabulary, part formal English, part street vernacular. He speaks with a slight lisp, softly, and, as though measuring his conversation partner, carefully. He affects a calm, but his manner is taut. He declined to speak about his crime except to say that it was among many things in his life that he wished had never happened.

At times he can be unnervingly self-aware.

"I may be paranoid," he said. "That would take somebody else to diagnose, but if I am, it has served me well in here."

Mr. Booker, who said he never knew his father, was born in Brooklyn. He and an older brother were reared by his mother, who worked mostly as a civil servant, and her two sisters. In a bitter poem called "Democracy" he paid tribute to his mother, who died, he said, when she was 46, describing her as "a dandelion seed of a woman" who was nonetheless "the embodiment of strong."

In "Wisdom" he wrote about life in Brooklyn with striking, impolitic candor:

We kids did chase and stone a goofy square.
None of us knew the dude. A lapsed rabbi? . . .
Maybe . . . none of us cared. Shoeless, he ran
Through Crown Heights, and on into East New York

And while his life outdoors was rough and tumble, at home, he said, he read voraciously: Virgil and Homer, Robert Louis Stevenson, Shakespeare, the Bible, Edgar Allan Poe.

"I lived two lives," he said. "Outside I was a thief and a hustler. I used drugs. But I was a bookworm in the house. Both my aunts belonged to the Book-of-the-Month Club, and as they got older, they worked as domestics for white families, and the families would throw away books. So they brought books home. I was never at a loss for anything to read."

He said he left school at 14, eventually joined the Army and was sent to Okinawa, Japan. In "Sandii," a poem that shows off his acute ear for dialect, he wrote about a romance with a Japanese woman. One stanza takes place in a restaurant:

Before lowering the extra large milk,
she whispered, "You ordering that whiskey
and a beer is bummer. This is place of eating,
not to do boilermaker, Stevosan. You tripping?"

Heroin was his drug of choice, though he said that he did everything, and that alcohol was his real downfall. After the Army, he said, he slipped back into the hoodlum life, ending up in Florida. He was arrested for robbery and served three and a half years of a five-year sentence. Shortly after his release he committed the crime he has been paying for ever since.

It was early in his confinement, he said, that he decided to revisit his reading.

"When I got here," he said, "I wasn't going to let my mind just ferment. I started thinking that maybe everything I'd read hadn't done me any good, and I almost convinced myself that what I'd read had got me into prison, that it was too informative about life, that it answered too many questions for a young guy. You know, translations of Baudelaire, William Burroughs. You're not supposed to be reading `Naked Lunch' at 11, `Doors of Perception,' by Huxley. That had me in the kitchen cabinets trying to get off on nutmeg."

He continued: "When I got to death row, I couldn't blame it on society. I knew I'd put myself in prison. But if this was the end of my life, I wasn't going to sit in a cell and watch TV or crane my neck trying to look out the window at the other wing of the prison."

Mr. Booker said that he had not been writing because of stress and frustration at being unable to get his manuscripts typed. Even so, he said, he has about a dozen poems circulating at various publications.

"Writing is like a magic carpet or a time machine," he said, before the guards cuffed his wrists again and led him away. "I go back in time to my own experience. I finally saw stars again, you know, when I was coming back from court or something. And they hadn't changed. I got it right. So I can leave the cell in my poems."

Stephen Todd Booker