Crime & Safety

Former Greenport Resident Facing Execution in Fla. Takes Case to D.C.

Convicted murderer Robert Waterhouse asks U.S. Supreme Court to review Florida court's decision to deny stay of execution.

Former Greenport resident Robert Waterhouse, who has spent decades on death row at Florida State Prison, was denied a stay of execution by the Florida Supreme Court this past Wednesday and is now taking his case to the U.S. Supreme Court, according to a report from the Miami Herald.

Waterhouse is scheduled to die by lethal injection on Feb. 15 at 6 p.m. Florida governor Rick Scott signed the order of execution — his first of the year — on Jan. 4.

Waterhouse, 65, was sentenced to life in 1967 for the 1966 rape-murder of 77-year-old Greenport resident Ella Carter. While out on lifetime parole in 1980, he raped and killed Deborah Kammerer in St. Petersburg, Fla., and was convicted of first-degree murder.

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Waterhouse had been sentenced to death for the 1980 conviction, but a 1985 stay of execution was issued four days before his scheduled execution. A judge ordered that Waterhouse be resentenced in 1988 due to mitigating evidence that his rights were violated during sentencing for the 1967 conviction. Waterhouse was sentenced to death again in 1990 by a unanimous jury vote.

According to the Herald, Waterhouse is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to review specifically why the Florida court did not "give weight to his contention that destroyed physical evidence could have exonerated him through current DNA testing."

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