A corridor at the Florida State Prison, where Michael Bell is scheduled for execution. | Florida Department of Corrections
Published on July 11, 2025 at 11:24 am
Free local news and info, in your inbox at 6 a.m. M-F. Sign up for the Jacksonville Today newsletter.
Five days before a Jacksonville man is scheduled to be put to death, a federal judge Thursday rejected arguments aimed at preventing the execution.
U.S. District Judge Wendy Berger issued a seven-page decision that said she did not have jurisdiction to consider the claims by Michael Bell’s attorneys. The decision came two days after the Florida Supreme Court also refused to halt the execution.
Jacksonville Today thanks our sponsors. Become one.
Gov. Ron DeSantis on June 13 signed a death warrant for Bell, who was sentenced to death in the December 1993 shooting deaths of Jimmie West and Tamecka Smith outside a Jacksonville bar.
Bell used an AK-47 rifle to shoot the pair as they got into a car. Court documents said Bell was accused of committing the murders while seeking revenge for the death of his brother, who had been killed by West’s half-brother, Theodore Wright, earlier in 1993.
Bell did not know that Wright had sold the car to West before the shooting, according to the documents. Bell’s attorneys have raised a series of issues, including that witnesses had recently recanted testimony that helped convict Bell.
Jacksonville Today thanks our sponsors. Become one.
If Bell, 54, is executed Tuesday, he would be the eighth Florida inmate put to death this year, tying a modern-era record set in 1984 and 2014.
The Florida Conference of Catholic Bishops on Thursday released a letter it had sent to DeSantis asking that Bell’s sentence be commuted to life in prison.
“All human life, given by God, is sacred,” Michael Sheedy, the conference’s executive director, wrote in the letter. “This sacredness is not contingent upon one’s guilt or innocence. There is a way to punish without ending another human life: life-long incarceration without the possibility of parole is a severe yet more humane punishment that ensures societal safety, allows the guilty the possibility of redemption, and offers finality to court processes.”
