Henry Lee Jones, Appellant v. State of Florida, Appellee

Summary

The court affirmed Jones’s first-degree murder conviction and death sentence. It held that the collateral-murder evidence was properly admitted to establish identity, that Jones validly waived presentation of penalty-phase mitigation, and that any error concerning the prior-violent-felony aggravator was harmless. Although the jury was not expressly instructed to find each aggravating circumstance unanimously, the court held the resulting sentencing error harmless beyond a reasonable doubt and independently upheld the evidence sufficiency and sentence proportionality. Justice Pariente, dissenting, would have excluded the collateral-crime evidence, while Justice Quince, concurring in part and dissenting in part, would have remanded for resentencing because the sentencing error was not harmless.