A Florida man convicted of the 1990 murder of an 11-year-old girl and her nanny elbowed his lawyer in the face hours before he was to be sentenced to death, wild courtroom video shows.
During Monday’s hearing in a Florida court, Joseph Zieler, 61, asked to speak with his attorney Kevin Shirley, NBC affiliate video. WBBH of the Fort Myers shows. As Shirley leaned in to speak to her client, Zieler raised his elbow and punched the man in the face.
Zieler was immediately taken down by deputies, the video shows.
Shirley said she was fine, telling the judge, “I used to box, I’ve taken a lot better shots than that.” He told NBC News that he was not hurt and he doesn’t know why his client attacked him.
“I had to know how the sheriffs would react,” Shirley said in an emailed statement Tuesday. “We had a very good working relationship. It was probably his last effort to make a public display and I was the only civilian he was able to attract within arm’s reach.”
Zieler was in court Monday morning for a Spencer hearing, which allows defendants to appeal directly to the judge, after he was convicted of the brutal murders of 11-year-old Robin Cornell and her nanny, Lisa. Story, 32, according to the Fort Myers News-Press. Cornell and Story were suffocated and sexually assaulted.
After Zieler punched his lawyer, he was escorted out of the courtroom and brought back about 10 minutes later, the newspaper reported. Zieler later refused to allow his family members to speak on his behalf and claimed his innocence.
“I have nothing to do with this,” he said, according to the newspaper. “I maintain my innocence.”
Hours later, he was sentenced to death on two counts of first-degree murder, according to court documents online.
Cornell and Story were found dead in their Cape Coral condominium by Cornell’s mother on May 10, 1990. The girl’s mother, Jan Cornell, testified that she lived in the home with her daughter and a friend and had left the night before to visit her boyfriend.
When he returned home, he found that the rear sliding glass doors were open, and the house was in a mess. She discovered the bodies of her daughter and friend in the upstairs bedrooms, according to court documents. DNA was collected from the scene, but the case went cold until 2016 when Zieler was arrested for an unrelated crime.
When he was booked for the 2016 crime, his DNA was entered into the Combined DNA Index System (CODIS), where it unexpectedly matched DNA samples from the 1990 crime scene, according to the documents. A second sample taken from Zieler was also shown to be a match, according to the documents.
Jan Cornell testified that she did not know Zieler, who was 28 years old at the time of the murders. Court documents said the crime was “cold, calculated and premeditated.”
