On February 5, 2026, appellate lawyer Michael Ufferman stood before the Florida Supreme Court in the mandatory death-penalty appeal of Wade Steven Wilson and did something justices rarely see. He spoke for about four minutes, declined to re-argue points the court had already rejected in other cases, and made clear that the defense was preserving its consтιтutional claims for the United States Supreme Court. Justice Renatha Francis remarked to those in the audience that hearings usually do not go that way, adding, with a light comment, that she promised them they did not. The brevity was the story. Wilson’s direct appeal, docketed as SC2024-1345 on September 16, 2024, raised seven issues aimed at overturning two death sentences imposed for the October 7, 2019 killings of Kristine Melton, 35, and Diane Ruiz, 43, in the Cape Coral and Fort Myers area. The sharpest of those issues is Florida’s 2023 law allowing a death recommendation on an 8–4 jury vote, applied to crimes committed years before the statute existed.

Wilson, widely called the “Handsome Devil” and sometimes the “ᴅᴇᴀᴅpool K*ller” because he shares a name with the Marvel character, was convicted in June 2024 in Lee County and formally sentenced to death on August 27, 2024, by Circuit Judge Nicholas Thompson. A jury had recommended death by 9–3 for Melton and 10–2 for Ruiz. Before April 2023, Florida required a unanimous jury recommendation. Senate Bill 450, signed by Governor Ron DeSantis on April 20, 2023, lowered the threshold to eight of twelve jurors after the life sentence in the Nikolas Cruz case, where a 9–3 vote had blocked death. Wilson’s team argues that using the new rule on 2019 crimes is an ex post facto problem under the United States and Florida consтιтutions, and that a state statute bars retroactive application of laws dealing with a crime or its punishment. At the February argument, the state’s lawyer, Rick Buchwalter, did not present a long reʙuттal and simply asked the court to affirm.

The timing matters because the Florida Supreme Court had already closed much of this door. On December 18, 2025, in Jackson v. Florida and Hunt v. Florida, the court unanimously upheld the 8–4 statute, rejecting Sixth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendment challenges and holding that the U.S. Supreme Court’s Ramos v. Louisiana decision, which requires unanimous guilty verdicts, does not control the penalty phase of a capital trial. Justice Jorge Labarga concurred while calling Florida’s threshold the lowest in the nation and the state an absolute outlier. Alabama is the only other death-penalty state that allows a non-unanimous recommendation, and it requires at least ten jurors. Attorneys in Jackson and Hunt filed certiorari peтιтions in 2026 asking the U.S. Supreme Court whether eight votes are enough, and Hunt’s peтιтion also asks whether the Ex Post Facto Clause forbids applying the new statute to crimes committed during the years when Florida required unanimity.

Wilson’s lawyers have said they intend the same federal path. As of mid-2026 he remained on death row at Union Correctional Insтιтution in Raiford, with no execution date set. Capital review in Florida commonly runs a decade or more. A grant in Jackson or Hunt would not free him, but it could force a new look at whether split juries may send a defendant to death for crimes committed under the old rule.