United Press International

FLORIDA - female death row inmate can drop appeals

Court okays Wuornos' death wish

Confessed female serial killer Aileen Wuornos can fire her attorneys and stop appealing her 5 death sentences, the Florida Supreme Court ruled Monday.

 The brief court ruling indicated she was competent to take accept the death penalty.

 Wuornos, 46, wrote several letters to the high court last year asking for her execution to go forward. In July, Circuit Judge R. Michael Hutcheson ruled she was competent to drop her appeals and referred the case to the Florida Supreme Court.

 During the July court hearing, Wuornos told the judge she was guilty of killing seven men who picked her up while hitchhiking in 1989 and 1990.

 "I want to tell the world that I killed those men," she said then. "I robbed them and I killed them as cold as ice, and I'd do it again, too. I'd kill another person because I've hated humans for a long time."

 The former prostitute said she robbed the men because she needed money and then killed them so there would be no witnesses. During her 1992 trial, she had claimed the men attacked her and she had acted in self-defense.

 Wuornos has a long criminal record including driving under the influence, shooting from a moving vehicle, assault, armed robbery and auto theft.

 The body of 1 victim was never found. Wuornos was only tried in 1 case, the death of the 1st victim, Richard Mallory, and pleaded guilty. She was arrested in 1991 and sentenced to death in 1992.

In an interview with WESH-TV of Orlando in 2000, she expressed remorse for the pain she had caused the victims' families. "After you're done killing a person and you realize what you've done, it will haunt you the rest of your life," she said.

 How soon Wuornos might be executed is yet to be determined because of a pending U.S. Supreme Court ruling.

 Earlier this year in an Arizona case, the court heard oral arguments suggesting the state's law on death sentences was unconstitutional because judges are not bound to follow jury recommendations of whether the death penalty or life in prison should be imposed in capital cases.

 Florida has a similar law that requires only a majority of the 12 jurors in a capital case recommend the death penalty.

 Florida judges typically hand down death sentences only when the jury has made such a recommendation. The court is expected to rule on the Arizona case in June.