Damas wants to plead guilty to killing family, but will Collier judge let him?

During a January 2011 hearing, a little more than a year after he was accused of killing his wife and five children in their North Naples home, Mesac Damas made a proposal to Collier Circuit Judge Frank Baker.

“I’d like to represent myself," said Damas, wearing an orange jail jumpsuit and sitting next to the lawyers appointed as his public defenders. "Is that OK?”

“I want my Lord, my God, my savior to represent me,” Damas told Baker.

The judge denied the request, saying he was “not close to being confident” Damas understood the seriousness of his request. He could face the death penalty if found guilty of six counts of first-degree premeditated murder.

Six years later, Damas, 41, ultimately might get his wish. 

More:Sept. 5 trial set for Damas in 2009 deaths of wife, 5 children in North Naples

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A hearing, known as a Faretta inquiry, scheduled Friday will allow Circuit Judge Fred Hardt — the third judge to oversee Damas’ case — to determine whether Damas is competent to conduct trial proceedings.

If granted, it could more quickly resolve what Collier County Sheriff Kevin Rambosk once called the “most horrific and violent event” in county history.

Damas admitted killing his family almost immediately after his arrest in Haiti in September 2009. He long has said he wants to plead guilty and be executed.

Hardt scheduled the Faretta inquiry after Damas spoke up during a June pretrial hearing, again requesting to relieve his court-appointed lawyers of their duties.

“I just want to thank those two gentlemen here; they are outstanding lawyers,” Damas said of James Ermacora and Kevin Shirley. “I want to thank them for their hard work, but I would like to remove them from this case.

"I would like to represent myself, and we don’t need no trial.”

He said he didn’t want jurors to see “those pictures of my kids and my wife,” referring to dozens of graphic crime scene and autopsy photos expected to be shown during trial.

“Your honor,” Damas said, “I’m responsible for my own actions.”

With Damas' history of mental health concerns and courtroom outbursts, it is no sure bet Hardt will comply with Damas’ request to represent himself.

Damas’ case has dragged on for almost eight years, marked by fits and stops — a trip to a state mental hospital, a rotating door of public defenders and challenges to the state’s death penalty law.

More: Mesac Damas murder case remains in legal limbo due to death penalty challenges

Rather than speed up the proceedings, it’s possible this latest wrinkle could draw the case out beyond a planned four-week trial in September.

“These defendants are a real challenge to the legal system,” said Bob Dillinger, a public defender in Pinellas and Pasco counties and president of the Florida Public Defender Association. “Particularly when you add in mental health and some incompetency here, and possible brain damage, it’s real difficult.”

Shirley said he and Ermacora, who took over Damas’ defense in March 2015, “absolutely” want to remain on the case, and are prepared to represent Damas through the criminal and penalty phases.

“As far as I’m concerned, Mr. Ermacora and I will fight to stay on Mr. Damas’ case,” Shirley said. “The judge is going to do what the judge is going to do.”

‘I want death’

On a September Saturday in 2009, deputies conducting a routine check on a North Naples town house stepped into a gruesome crime scene. 

Blood pooled in front of a closet below the stairwell. Inside the closet they found the body of Guerline Dieu Damas, 32, bound with a white extension cord, her head covered with a black plastic bag.

In the upstairs bedrooms they found the bloodied bodies of five Damas children — Michzach, 9; Marven, 6; Maven, 5; Megan, 3; and Morgan, 11 months — with deep, wide cuts across their throats.

The only missing family member: Mesac Damas.

He had fled to Haiti, where authorities tracked him down days later. While being taken to the airport for extradition, Damas confessed to a Daily News reporter that he killed his family.

"Yes, I did," he said, adding later from the back of a pickup, "I want death."

But for almost eight years, Damas’ case has slowly wound through the courts.

More:Judge rules 60 autopsy photos admissible at Mesac Damas trial

More:Autopsies confirm Damas victims died from having their throats slashed

Early on, Damas was disruptive in court, prone to outbursts and preaching about Jesus. His weight fluctuated as he went on self-imposed fasts.

Damas talked about being possessed by demons. At one point he asked a judge to “throw the switch.”

A psychiatrist testified Damas had a “delusional disorder.”

In 2014, a judge ruled Damas incompetent to stand trial because he suffered from a “major mental illness.” He sent Damas to a state mental hospital, where his competency was restored.

Last year, Shirley and Ermacora stated they thought Damas suffers from a traumatic brain injury.

More: Murder defendant Mesac Damas believed to have brain injury, his lawyers say

During his June hearing, Damas also talked about “voodoo,” said he was a target in the Collier jail and described “torture” at the hands of jail deputies. He specifically mentioned a struggle with deputies in early June when hospital staff were inserting a catheter to deliver fluids after a fast.

That all could be fodder for Friday’s Faretta inquiry.

“Yeah, the judge is going to consider all of that, I’m sure,” said Craig Trocino, director of the Miami Law Innocence Clinic.

A loose standard

The Sixth Amendment guarantees defendants the right to counsel. In 1975, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Faretta v. California that criminal defendants also have a right to refuse counsel and to represent themselves in court.

During a Faretta inquiry, a judge determines whether a defendant waiving a right to counsel is doing so “knowingly, intelligently and voluntarily,” Trocino said.

The judge asks the defendant questions about mental illness, education level, the ability to read and write, and then asks about familiarity with the justice system. The judge also is required to warn the defendant about the dangers and disadvantages of self-representation.

More:Confessed killer Mesac Damas wants to die, so should court system let him?

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“When you’re too entrenched in (your case) from your own emotional point of view, you lose the outside objectivity that a lawyer is necessary for,” Trocino said.

Competency to conduct a trial is a higher threshold than competency to stand trial, said Pete Mills, an assistant public defender in Florida’s 10th Judicial Circuit and chairman of the Florida Public Defender Association’s death penalty steering committee.

“Sitting next to your lawyer and having him or her conduct the trial and being competent to go through that experience is one thing, versus being able to conduct the trial by oneself,” Mills said.

The burden is not especially high, though, said Mills and Dillinger. They said most defendants who request self-representation typically are allowed it.

“It’s a very loose standard, in terms of if you understand the judicial process, you can represent yourself,” Dillinger said.

Competency also can be fluid, Mills said, affected by medications and stress.

“Regardless of how stressful jail is, being in trial is a whole different stress,” Mills said.

“Someone can become incompetent while failing to deal with that appropriately.”

Life or death

Damas’ four-week trial is scheduled to begin Sept. 5, if he doesn’t plead guilty first.

When asked about Damas’ desire to represent himself and plead guilty, Guerline Dieu’s sister, Magalie Dieu, said, “Whatever.”

“It’s up to him,” she said. “I don’t care.”

Another sister, Netty Fleury, said in 2010 that she thinks Damas should be sentenced to life in prison. Attempts to reach her for this story were unsuccessful.

“When you die, you done suffering,” she said. “He needs to go to prison.”

Reached at his East Naples apartment, Jean Damas, Mesac Damas’ father, sat at his kitchen table and used his white T-shirt to wipe tears from his eyes as he discussed his son.

He hasn’t spoken to him recently, he said. It’s too hard.

“I’d be fine if he pled guilty,” Jean Damas said softly. “Whatever comes will be fine with me.”

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He said he believes Mesac Damas’ religious conversion is real. He believes his son has repented.

“It’s very important,” he said. “Very important.”

Even if Damas represents himself and pleads guilty, there is no guarantee he’ll be sentenced to death.

“The judge might think it’s more mitigating to punish someone with life. There are jurors who believe that,” Mills said.

“There are defendants who are so afraid of prison that jurors think it would be better to punish them with life in prison than it would be to put them on death row.”