The Florida Supreme Court affirmed the denial of postconviction relief to a death-row prisoner on October 22, 2026, and in doing so it rejected a late claim built on a neurologist’s 2025 evaluation. In Craven v. State, Nos. SC2024-0251 and SC2024-1181, the Court held that a seizure disorder diagnosed decades earlier is not “newly discovered,” and that a report saying someone is at high risk of developing chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) is not even a tentative CTE diagnosis.
The case. Daniel Jacob Craven Jr. was convicted in 2018 of the first-degree murder of his cellmate. He was already serving a sentence of life without parole for a prior first-degree murder. The jury unanimously found four aggravating factors: a prior felony and under sentence of imprisonment; a prior capital or violent felony; heinous, atrocious, or cruel; and cold, calculated, and premeditated. It unanimously recommended death. The Court affirmed on direct appeal in 2020 (Craven v. State, 310 So. 3d 891), and the U.S. Supreme Court denied certiorari in 2021.
What he raised. Craven appealed the denial of his initial motion under Rule 3.851 (filed 2022), the denial of a successive motion, the denial of a public-records request and a motion to transport him for testing, and he petitioned for habeas corpus. The Court affirmed every order and denied the petition. Justice Tanenbaum did not participate. The other six Justices concurred in the per curiam opinion.
The claims, and why they failed:
- Jury selection. Craven argued his trial lawyer should have asked for a court-reporter readback of a prospective juror’s answers when the State objected to his peremptory strike. The Court said this was the same issue he lost on direct appeal, so it was procedurally barred. It also failed on the merits: the State had itself suggested a readback, and the trial court’s ruling rested on a finding that Craven treated the juror differently than similar non-Black jurors.
- Giglio/Napue. Craven said the State presented false testimony about how old he was when first placed in foster care. The Court held the claim barred because his birthdate was in the direct-appeal record, so it could have been raised then. Assuming the testimony was false and the prosecutor knew it, the Court also found no materiality: the difference between eleven months and one year and ten months “does not undermine the mitigation presented,” and four strong aggravators weighed against materiality.
- Penalty-phase ineffectiveness. Applying Strickland, the Court rejected every penalty-phase subclaim, most for lack of prejudice. Each tried to add detail to the childhood-trauma mitigation the jury had already heard, and the Court found the postconviction evidence “largely cumulative.” The subclaims were: (a) counsel should have obtained the complete dependency file, which would have given the defense experts “more examples and greater context”; (b) counsel should have presented prenatal drug and alcohol exposure, but counsel “had no competent evidence” of it; (c) counsel miscalculated Craven’s age at first removal from his mother’s home (eleven months, not one year and ten months), which the Court called a “small error” that was neither deficient performance nor shown to matter; (d) counsel should have shown he lived with his mother as a teenager, but Craven made no attempt to explain deficiency or prejudice; (e) counsel should have elicited more about the trauma of repeated removals; (f) counsel should have presented a “complex trauma” diagnosis, but counsel was not deficient for failing “to present the same mitigation under a different diagnostic label”; (g) counsel should have retained a child-development expert, which the Court treated as a reasonable strategic choice, citing the U.S. Supreme Court’s statement that choosing an expert is “a paradigmatic example” of a strategic choice; (h) counsel should have retained a particular expert, whose figures were available from his publications; and (i) counsel should have cross-examined the State’s expert differently, a strategic choice. The Court weighed all of this against four aggravators and rejected the cumulative-error claim because there was no error to accumulate.
- “Newly discovered” seizure disorder. Craven’s successive motion relied on a February 28, 2025 evaluation by a neurologist. The Court found the seizure disorder was not newly discovered (it also held the claim procedurally barred because the jury heard his seizure history): the neurologist’s own report noted records documenting the diagnosis more than two decades earlier, Craven had reported about two seizures a month for thirty years, and his seizure history was presented to the jury. Even a May 2024 diagnosis, as Craven told the neurologist, would have been filed more than a year later and so would be untimely under Rule 3.851(d). The Court likewise rejected, as untimely, barred and meritless, his “notion” that a traumatic childhood contributed to the seizure disorder.
- CTE. The report said Craven’s childhood head injuries put him “at high risk for the development of” CTE as he ages. The Court said being at risk “is not tantamount to being tentatively diagnosed.” It added that even with a tentative or confirmed diagnosis, Craven had not shown timeliness, because he did not show when CTE became capable of being diagnosed in living people. The burden of proving a successive claim is timely is on the defendant.
- Method of execution. Craven argued his seizure condition made both lethal injection and electrocution an intolerable risk. The Court held the claim insufficiently pleaded because he never identified a known and available alternative method that entails a significantly less severe risk of pain, which the Court’s cases applying Glossip v. Gross require (it cited Asay v. State). He identified none below or on appeal. No alternative, no evidentiary hearing.
- Public records. The Department of Corrections objected to releasing prison dayroom video and body-camera footage on three grounds: a security exemption under section 119.071(3), health privacy under section 945.10, and that Craven had not shown the records related to a colorable claim. Craven did not challenge the security exemption on appeal. The Court held he “abandoned any challenge to that independent ground” and affirmed without reaching his other arguments.
- Motion to transport for brain imaging and EEG. The Court called the argument “vague and entirely conclusory.” The neurologist’s recommendation of tests did not show a particularized need, and Craven did not show prejudice.
- Habeas. Craven argued appellate counsel should have argued that aggravators must go to the grand jury and that guilt-phase testimony amounted to victim-impact evidence. The Court cited its repeated rejection of the grand-jury argument (Sanchez-Torres v. State, 322 So. 3d 15 (Fla. 2020)) and held the victim-impact claim meritless. Appellate counsel is not ineffective for failing to raise a meritless issue.
Takeaways for postconviction practice.
- A “new” diagnosis has to be actually new. A report that restates old records will not restart the one-year clock.
- A defendant must prove the date the claim became discoverable, not just assert it.
- “At risk for” a condition and “diagnosed with” it are different facts, and the Court read the report that way.
- A method-of-execution claim has to name an alternative at the pleading stage.
- If the State’s records objection rests on several independent grounds, challenge every one.
The Court’s own factual account of the offense is long and graphic. This summary leaves it out and covers only the legal rulings.
Source: Craven v. State, Nos. SC2024-0251 & SC2024-1181 (Fla. Oct. 22, 2026). This article is general information, not legal advice.