https://www.nwfdailynews.com/story/news ... 423882002/Thomas Fletcher gets 'retirement plan' he wanted by being sentenced to die
Thomas H Fletcher received the "retirement plan" he claimed he wanted Wednesday when Circuit Court Judge Scott Duncan ordered that he be put to death for the September 2018 murder of his cellmate in the Blackwater State Prison.
"Fletcher killed his cellmate by choking him from behind inside their shared prison cell," a news release from the First Judicial Circuit State Attorney's Office said. "He confessed to the crime and admitted that he committed the murder in order to be sentenced to the death penalty."
In a sentencing order included with the news release, Duncan noted that Fletcher had been looking for another inmate to kill when he found Kenneth Davis, who claimed to be suicidal.
Fletcher was quoted as saying that by killing Davis he could end Davis' prison sentence while at the same time incurring the death sentence he considered to be his own "retirement plan."
Fletcher pleaded guilty to the murder but could not waive an evidentiary hearing on whether the death penalty should be imposed, the news release said.
A special counsel for the defense presented arguments against putting Fletcher to death at the hearing, but the judge sided with the State Attorney's Office that the penalty was warranted.
Fletcher was serving a life sentence for the 1994 murder of a Broward County drug dealer at the time he killed Davis.
Davis was 33 at the time of his death. He was serving a sentence of 25 years for trying to kill his ex-wife and her boyfriend with an explosive device in Walton County in 2015.
Blackwater State Prison is 44 miles from Niceville.