James Robertson

The backstory

Background

By December 2008, Robertson had been in prison for 28 years. He was first convicted of a felony before his 18th birthday, and offenses he committed in prison added to his sentence; his projected release date was 2038.¹ “Based on a history of violence within the prison system,” the Florida Supreme Court wrote, he was being held under close management.¹ A Department of Corrections officer testified at sentencing that close management is for inmates considered extremely dangerous to other inmates or to officers.³ Robertson and Frank Hart were cellmates at Charlotte Correctional Institution, north of Fort Myers.¹⁰

The plan

By the facts Robertson stipulated to, he had been planning a murder for about four months before Dec. 10, 2008.³ The sentencing judge found that Robertson said he had been planning since July 2008 to kill someone in order to receive the death penalty, and that he admitted assessing his weight against Hart’s and believed he could overpower him.³ According to the Florida Supreme Court, he waited until Hart was asleep and the guards had made their rounds, knowing he would have thirty minutes before they returned.¹

The killing

In the early morning of Dec. 10, 2008, Robertson strangled Hart “with a garrote he made by tying several socks together,” the court wrote.¹³ In his statement he said there was no provocation or fight.¹ The stipulated facts say Hart was asleep in his bunk when the attack began, and that he “briefly struggled, and tried to kick the cell door.”³ The associate medical examiner found the cause of death was “homicide by strangulation.”³

The sentencing judge relied on Robertson’s recorded statement. In the judge’s words, Robertson “admitted to waking the victim, and offering him the choice of being tortured or killed,” and “when the victim ran to the cell door yelling for help, a struggle ensued.”³ The judge wrote that Robertson admitted “he wanted to torture the victim, and would have killed the victim regardless,” and noted that inmates who were interviewed said they heard Hart screaming for help.³

What he did and said afterward

The judge found that Robertson covered Hart’s body “so it would look as if the victim was sleeping,” slept in the cell with the body, and in the morning ate both his own and Hart’s breakfasts.³ In an affidavit, Robertson said he killed Hart “so that he would be charged with first-degree murder and sentenced to death.”¹ He told investigators he had been in the prison system since 1980 and was tired of prison life.⁸ According to the sentencing order, he stated that if he did not receive the death penalty, “he would continue to kill until he received it.”³

The state first charged him with second-degree murder in May 2009.³ At his first appearance, Robertson said the charge should be first-degree murder, and in 2009 he wrote to five people in the State Attorney’s Office saying the killing was premeditated.³ He rejected the state’s offer of a life sentence in exchange for a guilty plea.¹ In October 2011, while held in the Charlotte County Jail, he attacked a jail officer with a homemade weapon and was charged with attempted murder.¹ The state’s brief says he did so to show how serious he was about wanting a death sentence.³

The plea

A grand jury indicted Robertson for first-degree murder on Oct. 26, 2012.³ Two mental health experts had found that he did not meet the standard for insanity, and the same experts evaluated his competence before the plea.¹ On Dec. 18, 2012, he pleaded guilty and waived a penalty-phase jury.³⁵ On his instructions, his lawyer did not object to the state’s evidence or contest the aggravating circumstances, and the court found that he had waived the presentation of mitigation.¹ Robertson testified that he committed the murder intentionally, and he admitted the attempted murder of the jail officer.¹ He testified that he had no remorse.³

The presentence report, prepared by a Department of Corrections probation officer, described him as “incorrigible” and recommended a death sentence.³ The Florida Supreme Court later held that the recommendation “did not influence the judge’s sentencing decision.”¹

Why the court chose death

The judge found four statutory aggravating circumstances, listed in full below.¹⁴ Robertson was under a sentence of imprisonment, and he had prior convictions for violent felonies; the judge gave each of these moderate weight.¹ The prior convictions the judge cited included three counts of aggravated battery in 1978, aggravated assault in 1980, battery on a law enforcement officer in 1988, and attempted first-degree murder.³ The judge gave great weight to the findings that the murder was especially heinous, atrocious or cruel, and that it was cold, calculated and premeditated.¹ For the second of these, the judge relied on his months of planning, his comparison of his and Hart’s weights, his timing of the guards’ cell checks and his conduct after the killing.³

The judge found one statutory mitigating circumstance, that Robertson was under extreme mental or emotional disturbance, tied to depression about his prospects in prison and the restrictions of close management, and gave it little weight.¹ The judge also gave little weight to five nonstatutory mitigators: a family history of alcoholism and substance abuse, hyperactivity as a child, childhood poverty, substance abuse and domestic violence, early drug use and a long criminal history leading to long-term incarceration, and a GED earned in prison.¹ The judge found that the aggravating circumstances outweighed the mitigating ones and sentenced him to death.¹

The appeal he did not want

Robertson wanted to waive his appeal and be executed.¹ His appointed appellate lawyer told the Florida Supreme Court that Robertson “wishes to argue in favor of the death sentence” and asked to withdraw, citing a Florida Bar rule requiring lawyers to follow a client’s decisions.² In July 2014 the court denied the motion, holding that death sentences are subject to automatic review, and wrote that it discerned “no ethical violation in requiring current counsel to continue to prosecute this appeal fully.”² News reports describe the court as sharply divided on the question.⁵ Robertson was allowed to file his own brief, in which he argued that the only issues the court should address were the sufficiency of the evidence and the proportionality of his sentence.¹

His lawyer argued that the judge should have appointed special counsel to present mitigation, that the presentence report was not comprehensive enough, that the judge prepared the sentencing order before the hearing, and that the judge treated Robertson’s wish to die as a nonstatutory aggravator.¹ On March 17, 2016, the court rejected each claim.¹ It found that Robertson was competent and knowingly waived mitigation, and that his wish to be sentenced to death was relevant to the finding that the murder was cold, calculated and premeditated.¹ It held his plea knowing, intelligent and voluntary, compared the case with other capital cases, and concluded that “the sentence of death meets the standards of proportionality.”¹

After the appeal

Robertson waived state postconviction review in June 2016 and did not file a federal habeas petition, according to a tracker of Florida capital cases.⁶ The Attorney General certified him as eligible for a death warrant on Feb. 7, 2019.⁶

The death warrant

DeSantis signed the warrant on Oct. 1, 2026.⁵⁶ The 12-day warrant period was the shortest since Florida resumed executions in 2017, according to the case tracker, and the Florida Supreme Court set deadlines for any litigation ending Oct. 11.⁶ As of Oct. 2, officials had not said whether Robertson would pursue last-minute appeals.⁷ On Oct. 8, DeSantis withdrew the warrant for William Lee Thompson, who was to be executed the same evening; the decision did not affect Robertson’s execution.⁹¹⁰

Personal backstory

Early life

Robertson told the presentence interviewer that he and his mother had been beaten by his father, and the report noted that he grew up in an economically disadvantaged home.³ The sentencing judge found a history of alcoholism and substance abuse in his family, and that he was exposed to poverty, substance abuse and domestic violence as a child.¹ The presentence report described him as very hyperactive as a child.³ He left school after the eighth grade.¹ The sentencing order says he admitted to using alcohol, cigarettes and marijuana since age 12.³

Life in prison

The sentencing order says his criminal history shows convictions from age 13 and that he has been “continuously incarcerated since 1980, when he was 17.”³ He obtained his GED in prison in 1982.³

Mental health

According to the state’s brief, he was first prescribed medication for depression in the late 1980s and early 1990s.³ A psychologist and a forensic psychiatrist who evaluated him in 2011 reported that he had no mental illness or defect affecting his ability to reason or tell right from wrong at the time of the offense.³ The sentencing judge found that he was under extreme mental or emotional disturbance, based on his depression over his prison prospects and close management.¹ In his own brief, Robertson wrote that “everything about my family history, mental health, education, etc., is well documented and already part of the record.”¹

In his own words

At sentencing, the judge quoted Robertson as saying, “I am tired of being in prison, especially in the conditions,” and described close management as keeping him from interacting with other inmates and depriving him of recreation time.³ In the first episode of the 2018 Netflix series “I Am a Killer,” he said he killed his cellmate to get better conditions on death row.⁵⁷ Of Charlotte Correctional, he said: “They took everything from me, like the TV, that’s torture.”⁵

Life on death row

Robertson has been on Florida’s death row since 2012.⁸ The sources reviewed contain no other information about his life on death row or any statement from him since the warrant was signed.