Live video: Death row or not, Mesac Damas will not leave Florida prison alive

If Mesac Damas is sentenced to death Friday for the 2009 murders of his wife and five children, he will spend the rest of his life — years, maybe even decades — alone in a closet-sized cell in North Florida with no air conditioning and little human interaction.

It’s a physically hard and emotionally draining existence, with the prospect of death always looming.

Watch the live video below of Mesac Damas' sentencing, or clickhere: 

More than eight years after Damas, 41, burst into his North Naples town house and sliced the throats of his wife, Guerline Dieu Damas, and their five young children, Collier Circuit Judge Christine Greider is scheduled to sentence him at 9 a.m. Friday to either life behind bars or death.

Either way, Damas will not leave Florida’s prison system alive.

Last month Damas pleaded guilty to six counts of first-degree murder, waiving his right to have a jury. He has repeatedly said he wants to be executed.

“We all have different opinions of what should happen,” Mackindy Dieu, the brother of Guerline Dieu Damas and uncle to her five children, said of his family members’ desires for justice. “My hope is the court will make a decision based on the crime that was committed, and the harshest punishment is my hope.

“Regardless of what his sentence is (Friday), they can’t restore our losses and answer all the questions we have and make sense of what happened. Ultimately, there is no win here.”

Reached at his East Naples home Thursday and asked about his son’s fate, Mesac Damas’ father, Jean, said only, “God knows. God knows.”

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More:Mesac Damas pleads guilty to killing wife, 5 kids; sentencing set for Sept. 29

With no jury, it is up to Greider alone to weigh the facts of the case — including evidence prosecutors presented earlier this week to show the killings were especially heinous and atrocious, as well as cold, calculated and premeditated — with evidence about Damas’ mental state and upbringing.

However, Damas waived his right to have mitigating evidence and testimony from defense experts introduced on his behalf, so it’s unclear what exactly Greider will consider.

“You have someone essentially signing up for suicide,” said Craig Trocino, director of the Miami Law Innocence Clinic.

That waiver of mitigating evidence is troubling, said Chance Meyer, a law instructor and adjunct professor at Nova Southeastern University and former lawyer with the Capital Collateral Regional Counsel-South, which represents death-sentenced defendants in post-conviction proceedings.

“It certainly makes it more likely that he’s going to get the death penalty,” Meyer said. “We have an unbalanced scale here, with only one side represented.”

Ideally, the judge would have heard from Damas’ family and friends and dug deeply into his past, Meyer said. Greider heard from only two defense experts: a specialist in Afro-Caribbean religion who testified about the violent Haitian culture and religiously confused household Damas was raised in, and a Naples neurologist who said Damas’ brain images showed evidence of possible schizophrenia.

“Certainly the court could be uncomfortable with the fact that a complete mitigation case hasn’t been presented,” Meyer said. “How can you determine whether someone deserves to die without knowing much about them, other than the crime?”

Typically, if a defendant is sentenced to death, there is a direct appeal to the Florida Supreme Court, which reviews the case for errors. After that, there are years of post-conviction proceedings through every level of state and federal court.

“It’s a huge system, and it takes years to go through it,” Meyer said.

There are 356 people on death row in Florida; all but three are men, according to the Florida Department of Corrections.

The average stay on death row in Florida is just shy of 13 years, although some inmates are there for decades, according to an appeal the Capital Collateral Regional Counsel filed with the Florida Supreme Court in 2011 on behalf of another death row inmate.

On death row, prisoners spend up to 23 hours per day alone in a hot 6-by-9-foot cell with no air conditioning, according to the report. They are allowed a shower every other day and are taken to the exercise yard twice a week for two hours at a time.

“Everywhere you go outside that cell, there is a belt that your arms are shackled to your waist, and your feet are shackled together,” Trocino said.

Inmates aren’t allowed to work or make phone calls, other than to family members in emergencies. They can have reading materials, and if friends or family give them money, they may be allowed to buy a Department of Corrections-approved television, and maybe a fan, some snacks and toothpaste.

And there is always the prospect of death at any time.

“Death could be tomorrow,” Meyer said. “And that goes on for years. It’s that constant not knowing. A corrections officer could walk down the hall at any time and hand him his death warrant.”