She wondered if trauma from his past had produced a kind of disassociation, since, as she put it bluntly, “It’s not normal human behavior to kill someone.” “I don’t have the words to tell you what is in my heart,” Baldwin recalls him saying. But he made clear he was still struggling to understand why he’d raped and killed her. Over the course of 15 meetings across four years, Belcher eventually admitted that he had lied to police about not knowing Embry the two had been secretly seeing each other. “You can influence a lot of people who are going to get out.” “You can have a valuable, meaningful life that’s worth living behind those walls,” she told me. Some in prison feel the alternative - a life sentence, with no chance of release - is worse than death, but Baldwin could tell Belcher wanted to live. His new trial, technically called a sentencing hearing, would determine whether he would die by execution. “After five minutes with her, I stop talking,” Belcher told me when I visited him on death row last summer. Or maybe it was Baldwin herself, with her messy yellow notepad, gravelly voice and unflinching eye contact. Maybe it was all the years of isolation and reflection. Maybe it was his new wife, a Swiss woman he met through a pen-pal program who now visited him regularly. It was her first meeting with Belcher, and his lawyers had warned her to expect an icy reception.īut the white-bearded 58-year-old, seated in the visitation room of Union Correctional Institution, was talkative - effusive even. One morning in the summer of 2018, Baldwin, 56, drove west from Jacksonville, the palm trees of her hometown giving way to the Southern pines that line the road to Florida’s death row. Her job would be to mine Belcher’s past for information that might sway a jury towards mercy - to unravel some of the mysteries of his life in order to save it. While both sides waited years for the resentencing hearing to be scheduled, the public defenders’ office hired an investigator named Sara Baldwin to work as a “mitigation specialist” in death penalty cases.
#Bleeding to death dream trial
The defense team would feature Chipperfield, who was still working into his 70s, and Lewis Buzzell, his original trial partner.īut there was a new player. Belcher’s case stuck out as a rare courtroom rematch: The lead prosecutor from 2001, Bernie de la Rionda, met with the Embry family and decided to come out of retirement to seek a new death sentence. Dozens of prisoners were entitled to new hearings - not over guilt, just punishment. Supreme Court sent a seismic shock through the Florida legal system, ruling that the state was giving judges too much power in death penalty decisions. Agnes Lopez for The Marshall Projectīelcher was still on death row in 2016, when the U.S. “He was just a stone wall.”Īt James Bernard Belcher’s September 2022 resentencing hearing, prosecutors displayed photos of Jennifer Embry (left), who was murdered by Belcher in Jacksonville, Florida, in January 1996. “He had no defense, and he knew that,” Chipperfield recalled in a recent interview. Belcher had denied knowing Embry entirely when police questioned him, despite the DNA match, and he refused to plead guilty in exchange for a life sentence.
It took the jury 16 minutes to recommend that Belcher be executed.ĭefense attorney Chipperfield was used to losing - this was 2001, and the death penalty was popular, especially in Florida.
He spent less than two years behind bars before getting out and killing Embry.
While this crime was sexual, he pleaded guilty to armed burglary and aggravated assault. She testified that he masturbated over her back. At age 29, he used a false identity to trick a Florida woman into sharing her address, and then bound and gagged her at gunpoint inside her bathroom. The prosecution portrayed Embry’s murder as the culmination of Belcher’s life spent preying upon women: As a teenager, he robbed them on the streets of Brooklyn, New York. “It’s a mystery, and there are some things about human behavior we just don’t know.” “Something in him allows him to have…a positive influence on other people, even when he can’t run his own life,” public defender Alan Chipperfield told the jury. The defense presented bewildered cousins and younger prisoners who described him as a generous mentor. The mystery of ‘Who?’ gave way to ‘Why?,’ but the nearly 1,500 pages of Belcher’s trial transcript were mostly devoid of real insights. This article was published in partnership with The Guardian.
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