Fla. Court Upholds Sentence

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. —  For a second time, the Florida Supreme Court has rejected the appeal of a burglar who received a life sentence because he had a pocketknife when he broke into an empty restaurant.

In a 4-2 vote Thursday, the court rejected the appeal of 47-year-old Clyde Bunkley, who was convicted in 1987 of armed burglary and sentenced to life.

The court had also rejected Bunkley’s appeal in November 2002. But Bunkley, representing himself, asked the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene, and a year ago the nation’s highest court ordered the Florida court to take another look at the case.

The question before the courts was whether Bunkley’s knife, which never left his pocket, was a “dangerous weapon” or a “common pocketknife” when he broke into a closed Sarasota restaurant in 1986.

The first definition is consistent with armed burglary and a life sentence. If the knife were deemed a “common pocketknife,” the crime would be a third-degree felony with a five-year prison term.

In Thursday’s decision, the state’s high court ruled that under the law when Bunkley was convicted, a jury “could permissibly conclude that a folding knife with a 3-inch blade carried closed in a burglar’s pocket was a ‘dangerous weapon.’ ”

Bunkley’s appeal rested in part on a later Florida Supreme Court ruling, in a separate 1997 case, that defined a pocketknife with a blade of 4 inches or less as a “common pocketknife.”

Justice Kenneth Bell wrote in Thursday’s ruling that the 1987 jury was properly instructed on the “unambiguous law applicable at the time of his offense” and Bunkley, who had 15 prior convictions, was sentenced according to that law.