Deceased: Robert Peede

DOC records show that Robert Peede died Monday after over 40 years on Florida's death row.

According to Florida Department of Corrections (DOC) records, Florida death row prisoner Robert Peede died Monday, July 21, while in DOC custody after serving over 40 years on death row.

Peede was 81 years old at the time of his death. He was sentenced to death for murdering his estranged wife in Orange County in March 1983.

The cause of Peede’s death is unclear. State policy requires that an autopsy be performed for all deaths; however, those records would only be accessible through a public records request.

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Background on Peede’s Sentence of Death

In 1984, Peede was convicted of murdering his estranged wife, Darla Peede, in 1983. After the jury recommended a death sentence by a vote of 11-1,¹ the trial court sentenced Peede to death.

In August 1985, the Florida Supreme Court affirmed Peede’s conviction and sentence of death. His death sentence became final on June 23, 1986.

In federal habeas, the federal district court partially granted Peede’s claims, concluding:

The total mitigation evidence after the evidentiary hearing included that Petitioner suffered from childhood illnesses, his parents were alcoholics, his mental health began to deteriorate after his mother's suicide, he suffered from Paranoid Personality Disorder and Delusional Disorder, he had a family history of mental illness, and he was behaving bizarrely prior to, and after, the California murder.

Had the aforementioned additional mitigation evidence been presented, a reasonable probability exists that the jury would have determined that the prior violent felony aggravator (California convictions) was mitigated, and thus warranted less weight. When considered with the remaining aggravator, that the murder occurred during the commission of a kidnapping, the aggravators were balanced or outweighed by the total mitigation evidence.²

In 2017, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit reversed that ruling.

After Hurst,³ Peede sought relief based on the jury’s nonunanimous recommendation. The claim was denied because Peede’s sentence of death became final before 2002.

1. Peede v. State, 249 So.3d 1181, 1182 (Fla. 2018).

2. Peede v. Att’y Gen., Fla., 715 Fed. App’x 923, 935-36 (11th Cir. 2017).

3. For a further explanation of Hurst, see the five-part TFDP series available here.