Corey Smith, the John Doe Gang leader during the ’90s in Miami’s Liberty City, has been fighting in state and federal courts for over three decades.
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Smith was convicted of both state and federal crimes for charges related to murders, weapons, and drugs. He had a win against the death penalty.
On Wednesday, State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle released a memo and a statement after Smith’s 2004 case came to an in Miami-Dade County court.
Smith was arrested on Nov. 12, 1988, and convicted of drug and weapons charges in federal court. He was just 27 when he was sentenced to life in federal prison with no chance for parole.
In 2004, in Miami-Dade County court, Smith was convicted of the murders of Angel Wilson, Cynthia Brown, Leon Hadley, and Jackie Pope.
A year later, Smith was sentenced to life in prison for the murders of Hadley and Pope and he was sentenced to death for the murders of Brown and Wilson.
A U.S. Supreme Court 2016 ruling prompted the Florida Supreme Court to order a new sentencing trial for the two death penalty cases in 2017.
Last year, Smith’s defense alleged prosecutors granted potential witnesses “favors” such as food, drinks, cigars, and time for sex in a police conference room.
This prompted Miami-Dade County Circuit Judge Andrea Wolfson to disqualify then Miami-Dade State Attorneys Michael Von Zamft and Stephen Mitchell in March.
Wolfson wrote she could not “help but wonder how many more instances of misconduct would have been unearthed had there been more time for the defense to investigate.”
Fernandez Rundle tasked Assistant State Attorney Jose Arroyo, the former executive director of the Miami-Dade County Commission on Ethics and Public Trust to evaluate the testimony.
According to the Jan. 10 memo released, Arroyo worked with four other prosecutors who did not “deem much of the testimony from the evidentiary hearing to be credible or accurate.”
In November, the State Attorney’s Office recommended the waiver of the death penalty.
In January, the State Attorney’s Office accepted Smith’s plea offer of 30 years in state prison “to ensure the integrity of the convictions” in 2004.
On Wednesday, Smith was serving a 60-year federal sentence that was set to expire in 2051.
“Regrettably, in the almost twenty years since his conviction in 2004, essential witnesses have died, others have refused to cooperate with prosecutors, and yet others have changed their prior statements or retracted their previous testimony,” Fernandez Rundle wrote in a statement.
Smith’s 30-year sentence is to be served concurrently with the federal sentence.
Read the memo