TALLAHASSEE, Fla. – A Florida inmate on death row for the murder of a 13-year-old Panama City girl is asking for a new sentence, after accepting the death penalty and forgoing a trial by jury as a promise to the victim’s now deceased mother.
Matthew Lee Caylor, 48, confessed to having sex with young Melinda Hinson then choking her to death in 2008 in a motel room in Panama City. Caylor at the time had been on felony probation in Georgia for molesting the 14-year-old daughter of a neighbor and was a registered sex offender.
Caylor said he once promised Melinda’s mother, Rhonda McNallin, that he would not put the family through a lengthy, difficult legal battle fighting for his life. But McNallin died from cancer in Kentucky in January 2021, and Caylor – who had waived a jury trial after his successful appeal of an earlier conviction – said the woman’s death relieved him from his promise.
Supreme Court justices this week in Tallahassee were skeptical considering Caylor’s latest appeal for a new sentence. Caylor’s public defender, Barbara Busharis, described the promise to the girl’s mother, and said Caylor wasn’t notified right away when McNallin died.
“Let's say he had made the determination to waive his rights because he had no objective belief in the afterlife and then he found religion and now he wants to change his waiver because he thinks he has to do some kind of thing with his life,” Justice John Couriel said. “Your rule would allow him to take that external consideration.”
Busharis pushed back.
“When somebody has made it clear throughout the proceedings that his goal in waiving is a promise, when that promise is impossible because of the death of the promisee and the person is not informed, then that person should be given the opportunity to reflect,” she said.
The government prosecutor, Charmaine Millsaps, said Caylor’s right to waive a jury trial wasn’t legally affected by any promise he made outside the courtroom. Couriel agreed.
Caylor is imprisoned in the maximum security prison in Raiford, between Gainesville and Jacksonville. He was sentenced to death in the case by an 8-4 jury vote. That sentence in Bay County was thrown out over a 2016 Florida Supreme Court ruling requiring death penalty verdicts to be unanimous. The court granted him a new penalty hearing, for which he waived the right to a jury and said he wanted to be executed.
He has since apparently changed his mind and begged a Bay County judge to spare his life, but he was sentenced to death again in 2023, 15 years after the girl’s death. Her nude body was found in the motel room where Caylor had been staying. The girl’s family had been staying at the motel –– which has since been demolished — after moving to Florida from Kentucky.
“I wish it was burnt to the ground a long time ago,” McNallin said in an interview in Panama City in 2020, her last interview about her daughter. “But it’s kind of sad in a way because that’s the last place she was on Earth breathing.”
Gov. Ron DeSantis last year prioritized increasing death penalty cases. In April, DeSantis signed a bill into law that allows the death penalty when the jury recommends death by a vote of only 8-4. Shortly after, he expanded capital punishment allowing the death penalty to be enacted for certain sexual crimes committed against children.
Florida executed six people last year, including its first execution since 2019. Florida contributed to a nationwide increase in executions carried out that year, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, a non-profit in Washington that compiles data about capital punishment.
The Supreme Court also heard another death penalty case this week, involving a condemned inmate named John Sexton.
Sexton was sentenced to death in 2013 for the 2010 murder of 94-year-old Ann Parlato in New Port Richey. He has been sentenced to death twice, after the Florida Supreme Court previously sent the case back for resentencing.
Public defender Karen Kinney asked the court Wednesday to change Sexton’s sentence over what she described as several errors, including the denial of funds for a private court-appointed attorney and money for travel to consult with legal specialists.
The government’s prosecutor, Christina Pacheco, said those decisions were “extremely minimal” compared with what she described as Parlato’s gruesome death, which included broken bones in her face and signs of sexual battery. She said Sexton deserves his original sentence.
“The mitigation pales in comparison to the heavy aggravation,” Pacheco said.
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This story was produced by Fresh Take Florida, a news service of the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications. The reporter can be reached at clairegrunewald@ufl.edu. You can donate to support our students here.