FLORIDA HIGH COURT GRANTS DEATH ROW INMATE NEW APPEAL ON DISABILITY CLAIMS
The Florida Supreme Court has granted death row inmate Khadafy Kareem Mullens permission to pursue a belated appeal regarding a lower court order from February 4, 2026.
In a ruling issued Thursday, the court closed one case and opened a new one to serve as the new notice of appeal.
Mullens received a death sentence for his role in an August 2008 robbery at the Central Food Mart in St. Petersburg. Authorities stated that Mullens and Spencer Peeples entered the store, where Mullens fatally shot store owner Mohammad Uddin and customer Ronald Hayworth, and wounded another customer who survived.
Peeples pleaded guilty in 2013 to two counts of first-degree murder and one count of attempted murder under Florida’s felony murder law. Prosecutors agreed not to seek the death penalty in exchange for his plea, and a Pinellas County judge sentenced him later that year. Mullens was sentenced to death in a separate proceeding.
In his opinion on the latest appeal, Justice Tanenbaum explained that Mullens’s case should proceed specifically as a review of a post-conviction motion under Florida Rule of Criminal Procedure 3.851, rather than Rule 3.203.
Mullens previously filed a motion in December 2017, amended in May 2018, arguing under Claim Four that his death sentence violated the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment due to intellectual disability. Following an evidentiary hearing, the post-conviction court noted that Mullens “presented a persuasive case of intellectual disability.”
However, that court initially vacated his death sentence based on a separate claim of ineffective assistance of counsel. Anticipating a new penalty-phase trial, the lower court deferred a final ruling on the intellectual disability claim.
The Florida Supreme Court later reversed that, reinstating Mullens’s death sentence in 2022.
Because the death sentence was reinstated and no new penalty trial will occur, Tanenbaum wrote that Mullens’s claim asserting intellectual disability as a bar to execution became active once again for a final ruling on the merits.
“Claim Four—that the defendant cannot be legally sentenced to death because of his intellectual disability—became ripe again for consideration once we reversed the vacatur,” Tanenbaum wrote. “The order denying that claim on the merits is a final one that is appealable here.”
The court’s decision allows Mullens to seek review of the circuit court’s February 2026 order under the newly established case docket.
READ: Man Gets Multiple Life Sentences After Child Abuse Investigation Spans Alabama And Florida
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