09 April 2024 :

April 4, 2024 - FLORIDA. Jury spares life of Tavares Calloway
Jurors in Tavares Calloway’s resentencing failed to meet the 8-4 vote threshold required for death.
A Miami-Dade jury late Thursday night spared the life of a man, Calloway, sentenced to death 14 years ago for the execution-style murder of five people in a Little Haiti apartment almost 3 decades ago.
Jurors agreed unanimously that Tavares Calloway committed the murders. But they failed to meet the new 8-4 vote threshold for death that was put in place last year by state legislators.
Miami-Dade prosecutors were forced to retry Calloway’s death sentence after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Florida’s death penalty law in 2016, which only required a majority vote. A year later the state Supreme Court ordered re-sentencings for Calloway and dozens of other Florida prisoners on death row.
In 2010, jurors voted by a 7-5 margin to send Calloway to his death after state prosecutors told them the story of how he and an accomplice named Antonio Clark shot and killed 5 men — some who were small-time marijuana dealers — in a Little Haiti apartment.
In his statement to police, Calloway told of how an acquaintance told him about a target for a potential “lick,” or small-time ripoff. Before the murders, the state said, Calloway and Clark purchased gloves, hats and camouflage outfits at a flea market and scoped out the apartment.
Then on Jan. 21, 1997, after watching one of the men get out of his car, Calloway told police he approached him with a gun and ordered him into the apartment, where the screen and front door were already open. When they got there, 3 men were eating around a table, a 4th sitting on a couch.
With the gun pointed at the man’s head as a threat, Calloway said he ordered all five of them to take off their pants and socks and lie down on the floor. Then, after Clark went to the store to buy some duct tape, the men’s hands and feet were tied up and their eyes and mouths covered with the tape.
Calloway said they sat around talking for 3 hours, part of the time spent foraging the apartment for money and jewellery. They eventually found about 2 pounds of marijuana and about $600. A decision was ultimately made to kill all 5 of the men who could identify Calloway.
Calloway was taken into custody after Clark brought up his name, while Clark was being investigated by police for another homicide.
The men killed by Calloway were Adolphus “Tank” Melvin, 27, Gary St. Charles, 22, Trenton Thomas, 26, Frederick McGuire, 31, and Melvin’s visiting nephew, Derwin Bernard Copeland, 28.
13 years later, Calloway was found guilty of capital murder and sentenced to death by a 7-5 vote. He was also found guilty of aggravated kidnapping, armed burglary and robbery.

https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2024/apr/05/miami-dade-jury-spares-the-life-of-a-former-death-/