It was another astonishing court appearance in a history of astonishing hearings and the trial involving Joseph Bova II, the now-34-year-old schizophrenic serving life in prison for the 2013 murder of Zuheily Rosado, the mother of five, at a Palm Coast convenience store on State Road 100.
Bova today rejected the new trial an appeals court ruled he was entitled to. But in a bewildering move none of the attorneys or the judge saw coming, and that put the lie to his chronic mental incompetence, he won himself a new plea agreement that could lower his sentence from life to 45 years.
Starting with the way he murdered Rosado, killing her execution-style though he didn’t appear to know her, to the way he explained why he shot her (voices told him to do it to save Flagler County), to the way he’s behaved in most of his court appearances since, one thing has been consistent throughout about Joseph Bova: he’s been unpredictable and inexplicable.
Today was no different. He was back in Flagler, back before before Circuit Judge Terence Perkins since his September 2019 jury conviction and sentence to life in prison. He was back because an appeals court had granted his appeal for a new trial. In one of his strangest performances, Bova had argued before trial in 2019 that he wanted to fire his attorneys and represent himself. Perkins said no, telling him that he could not knowingly allow him to do something that would ensure his defeat.
One of the lawyers Bova wanted fired, Josh Mosley, filed a motion for a new trial. Weeks later the judge defended his decision in detail and denied the motion in an eight-minute hearing Bova did not attend. Mosley appealed, arguing that Perkins was wrong to deny his client a fundamental right. The Fifth District Court of Appeal exactly a year ago agreed, and ordered a new trial.
Bova was ordered back to Flagler in March from his prison at Dade Correctional, and was found incompetent to proceed. It was a repeat of the history of his case. He’d been found incompetent in 2014 and 2017 before he was finally judged competent to stand trial in September 2019. The latest determination of incompetency followed a four-hour consultation with a psychologist at the Flagler County jail in March and April 2021, when he was repeatedly uncooperative, mumbling and acting oddly, and ending the second encounter by saying he wanted to represent himself. He’d not been taking his required medication. He was again sent to a state hospital. By Sept. 7, he was found competent to proceed as long as he stayed on his medication for schizophrenia.
But Bova in October himself claimed he was incompetent to proceed. While he was at the county jail again, pending his next hearing, he refused to take his medication. Still, he insisted he would represent himself. He remained at the jail. Yet another status hearing was scheduled for today.
That’s when Bova sprang the first of his latest surprises. There would be two more in the space of a few minutes, the most startling left for last.
“I don’t want to take it back to trial, your honor,” Bova told Perkins, speaking by video link from the county jail.
Bova looked like someone emerged from an underground, his eyes entombed in puffed up lids and under-eyes, his hair a halo-like shag of black, his striped orange and white jail garb flopped on. He did not look like a well man, and never has been. But what was about to happen was another twist that hinted at a man in better command of his faculties than he let on.
The judge had been reviewing the latest determinations about Bova with Mosley and Assistant State Attorney Mark Johnson, and wanted to move on to discuss whether or not Bova still wanted to represent himself–and schedule a new trial. The lawyers talked about a trial in May. They were about to settle on the second week of May when Bova jumped in.
“I don’t want to go back to trial. I have no reason. I don’t object to what happened in the first trial,” Bova said. “So please, let’s just end it right here.”
“So you’re interested in entering a plea?” the judge asked him.
“I don’t wish to take it back to trial, Your Honor.”
Both Bova and Perkins were confused at this point. Bova wasn’t understanding that to “end it right here” he would have to enter a plea. Perkins wasn’t understanding Bova’s latest reversal, which clearly took everyone by surprise. Perkins still needed to know whether Bova wanted to represent himself: even entering a plea, he’d have to decide whether to do it with a lawyer or to do it himself. He didn’t want representation.
Then he sprang one more surprise. He claimed not to have known that an appeal was filed on his behalf. “Who brought it up the district court that I didn’t get to represent myself?” he asked. Perkins told him. He again repeated his wish to end the case.
“Can you please at least meet with Mr. Mosely and Mr. Smith and talk to him about that issue?” the judged told him (Smith is Mosley’s co-counsel).
“He has refused to meet with us since the last hearing date, saying he was representing himself. Our experts, our counsel, he has refused to even come out of his cell most times to come talk with us,” Mosley said.
Perkins told Bova that he would send him a plea form, but still wanted Bova to go over it with his attorneys.
“What is the plea for?” he asked. The judge told him: admission to the crime. “I don’t want a new sentence, I want to keep the old sentence the way it was,” Bova said, “the way the the jury that found me guilty. I want to keep it that way. I don’t want to have a new plea.” He was referring to his life sentence.
Perkins told him he had no choice in the matter. Bova continued arguing, saying whoever filed the appeal did so illegally. Perkins then defended Mosley for filing the appeal.
Then came the third surprise: “Are you still offering the 40 years for me?” Bova asked. There had apparently been talk of a plea agreement in 2019, before the trial. A tired-of-it-all-sounding Mosley explained it: “There was a 45 to life offer that you all made at Judge Perkins’s request. But Mr. Bova said he wouldn’t entertain it. So it never formally became an offer.”
“If the State offered the 45 to life,” Perkins said, “we would have a new sentencing hearing, but it would be 45–the parameters would be the lowest is 45 years, the highest would be life.” Now Perkins asked Johnson: “Will the state offer 45 to life?”
“Yes, your honor,” Johnson said.
And just like that, Bova got a glimmer of hope to edge back from his life term. At that point, Bova gave in: he would agree to meet with lawyers, go over the plea form, and return to court with it for sentencing on a 45-to-life sentence.
“All right. Thank you very much, sir. Your Honor,” Bova, now all clarity and sprightliness, told Perkins. And he had done it without the intercession of lawyers, though it’s not really clear whether even he was aware of what he’d won.
Bova is 34. He has already served almost exactly nine years in prison (he was first jailed on Feb. 21, 2013). Getting a 45-year sentence, instead of life, would be no small victory. It would mean that he’d still have 36 years to serve. With gain time, if it applies (that is, early release for good behavior), his effective sentence would be reduced to 38 years–or 29 more years in prison. He could be released when he is 63. But that’s assuming Perkins would go for the lower end of the scale. The state will argue for life. It’s an open question whether Bova will allow his attorneys to argue for him.
It’s also, of course, an open question whether Perkins will go for the lower end of the sentence range. The whole arrangement could well have been a means of getting Bova to just go along with the required mechanics, the plea form, the meeting with his attorney, the next hearing and the sentencing, without further surprises. He was sentenced to life once. He could very well be sentenced to life again.
But pleas change things. They indicate a measure of acceptance of the crime committed, and some judges, if not most judges, are loath not to recognize that. Otherwise it sends a chilling message to other defendants who might decide that pleading isn’t worth the risk if the outcome is all the same. And Perkins is not among the circuit’s more sadistic judges. So Bova’s chance at a lower sentence–even if not quite 45–is not imaginary.
The plea hearing is scheduled for March 11 at 1:30 p.m. It will be followed by a yet-unscheduled sentencing hearing.
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FlaglerBear says
I think it’s grand that we have a criminal justice system here in America that allows murderers like Bova to play “let’s make a deal.” Now, he has an opportunity to see freedom while still a relatively young man. Unfortunately, he did not afford Zuheili Rosado the same privilege. She didn’t have access to lawyers, psychologists, easygoing judges, or free meals. She died in the middle of the night trying to support her family. Stick this cretin in a cell, and throw away the key! He doesn’t deserve to ever breathe free air again.
tina tinsley says
Well said. I loved her.email the governor plze
Tina says
Agree. Please email our gov. He won’t put up with this mess.
Concerned Citizen says
So much time wasted when Zuheily lies in her grave.
A young woman murdered in cold blood leaving behind children. Who forever will live with that. And this dude played the crazy card. And got away with it. And is back playing the system.
If Perkins falls for it. And reduces any of that sentence he needs to be voted out.
tina tinsley says
He was a full on stalker. Crazy customer she had and not interested. She was doing all she could to start fresh. That lunatic executed her. It was clear and calculated. Bova last name. They tried to make it look like the father did it at first. He ain’t schitzo. A black man can do half that shit, be hung already. Bullshit. I already wrote the governor. Will you? She was my friend and a mother.
Wow says
How much more time and money is going to be wasted on this guy?
A.j says
Don’t understand this. A plea deal to lower his sentence. He killed a mother and the court will let him out soon I believe. Why play with this murderer, he killed an innocent person, wasting 😒 our tax $s. This system give people a reason to kill because they know they will not get the death sentence.
ASF says
Bova is as crazy as a fox. The justice system has failed the victim’s family.
Ray W. says
In the early hearings on competency, on cross-examination, the State’s two expert witnesses agreed with the testimony offered by the defense expert witness that one’s status of incompetence is more like a “snapshot” into one’s life than a permanent condition. Each of the three expert witnesses testified that a person can be competent on one day while being interviewed by one expert and incompetent the next day when interviewed by a different expert. And each of the three expert witnesses testified that the best way to assess one’s mental health status would be to have a team of experts evaluate Mr. Bova’s mental health status over a long period of time. Judge Walsh accepted that testimony and ordered Mr. Bova back to the state mental health hospital for a long-term assessment.
Regarding Bova’s position on defense attorneys, while I was working on another case on the date of his Arraignment, I was told by the attorney covering for me that Mr. Bova fired the private law firm that his parents had hired on his behalf. Mr. Bova apparently also explained to the judge that he believed that anyone who had ever helped him had been hurt by those who opposed him (his father later told me that a teenage Bova ordered a dinner at an upscale restaurant but almost immediately expressed his belief that someone in the kitchen was going to poison his order. According to his father, Mr. Bova spent hours on the internet trying to locate the restaurant owner’s home phone number. When he found it at about 3 am, he called the owner and accused him of trying to poison him). Mr. Bova told the judge that he just didn’t want anyone to hurt the attorneys on his privately hired legal team. Then, he commented that it would be OK for the judge to appoint a public defender to represent him. While his position on this issue may have changed over the years, it remains possible that he still holds the delusion that those who oppose him will hurt anyone who tries to help him and that he doesn’t want his current legal team to be hurt.
As an aside, corrections officers told me that Mr. Bova lies on his bunk for days on end, staring at the wall. I spoke with a medical examiner about his swollen facial features. I was told that when one fails to move for days on end the cellular functions that eliminate waste liquids from cells begin to break down, resulting in swollen facial features. The one time that corrections officers took me upstairs into the cell block in the new portion of the jail, Mr. Bova was laying on his side staring at the wall, completely non-responsive to any comments directed to him.
Time after time, prosecutors argue that Mr. Bova presents as a competent individual. Time after time, expert witnesses testify that Mr. Bova presents as an incompetent individual, unless he is appropriately medicated. When a prosecutor acts as a zealous advocate, as they should, they are going to see Mr. Bova as competent. When an experienced and qualified psychologist acts as a professional witness, he or she is going to commonly testify that Mr. Bova has serious mental health issues that impact his competency.
Pierre Tristam says
I have covered this case for the last nine years and witnessed almost every one of Joseph Bova’s court appearances. Simply put, the case (and many others like it) indicts Florida’s standards for competency. The standards are so contrived that anyone who displays, at that specific moment when a court-appointed psychologist happens to be evaluating the individual, an absurdly basic level of awareness and ability to answer the equivalent of saying one’s name and understanding a subject-verb clause, is deemed “competent.” The exercise has nothing to do with competency as conventionally or clinically—let’s not even touch morally—understood. It is designed to empty beds at the state hospital, sooner than later, and clear the court’s docket of the case. This struck me years ago when a lawyer told me that doctors almost always get around to finding competency. It’s not a matter of whether, but of when. That alone flies in the face of reality. It is as if to say that Florida state hospitals somehow have managed to solve the millennial-old mystery of mental illness, always returning the mentally ill to competency. I don’t think anyone needs a medical degree to know this much: that’s not how it works, and it only underscores how, and how often, the defendant would have been incompetent—that is, insane, to use the court’s term—at the time of the crime, only subsequently to be doped into a fiction of competence. There’ll come a time very far in the future, Florida being so deep in regression for now, when Florida’s competency standard will be found to be a violation of the Eighth Amendment. It’ll be as obvious as the bouncing balls in Blumfeld’s apartment (in Kafka’s story). Until then, we’ll endure a system pretending to mete, if not meat, out justice when it is only masking the Medieval habit of condemning certain miscreants by tying them up in sacks and throwing them in the river. Needless to say, the court system isn’t to blame here, it’s only following the law. The blame goes to those seemingly sentient beings in Florida’s House and Senate, whose claim to competence is the unreported, unceasing crime.
Ray W. says
Thank you for your comments, Mr. Tristam. During the five years that I interacted with Mr. Bova, if you could call it interacting, I do not recall ever leaving the jail holding the impression that he was competent. I will say that corrections staff always displayed courtesy and patience in its most difficult task of caring for Mr. Bova. I was advised that he once went on a hunger strike. Not because he wanted to bring attention to any mistreatment by corrections staff but because he fixated on the necessity of eating only unwashed raw spinach and washed fruit at every meal (I recall peaches, but I might be wrong). After a long period of weight loss to the point of endangering his health, the jail’s medical staff relented and ordered the special diet. A corrections officer began driving to Target to pick up the ingredients. I still suspect that Mr. Bova irrationally believed that he could not be poisoned by these foods.
One difficult part of developing Mr. Bova’s case arose from the lack of medical records pertaining to an incident of coma arising from the time a motorist struck Mr. Bova from behind as he rode a dirt bike. Under that state’s records retention statute, doctors and medical facilities were permitted to destroy medical records seven years after a patient left treatment. One doctor’s administrative staff advised that they had destroyed the medical records. My investigator, as I recall, contacted the treating hospital only to find that those records had been destroyed as well. I cannot know the extent of permanent traumatic brain injury Mr. Bova has, but there seems little doubt that the brain damage was significant in scope. Most dual-diagnosis cases involve some form of drug abuse and mental illness. Very few cases involve a dual-diagnosis of childhood traumatic brain injury and a later bout of schizophrenia emerging in the middle teen years.
Regarding those commenters who want death or that society will fail if Mr. Bova doesn’t get life (the kill them all contingent), yet more proof that there is a just America and a vengeful America. First of all, one of the main reasons we have judges is that we have always had people like these various FlaglerLive commenters who want death at every turn. No liberal democratic Constitutional republic would ever want such impulsive and vengeful people like these FlaglerLive commenters to impose sentences on anyone, much less the mentally ill among us. Our founding fathers knew that such people would always exist, which explains why they inserted the cruel and unusual language into the 8th Amendment to protect individual citizens against the kill them all contingent. The plea offer is 45 years to life. The State made that offer; there was no duress. My years of working against this particular prosecutor informs me that he knows what he is doing and that he works hard to zealously represent the State’s interests. I put his knowledge and skills as head and shoulders above those presented by the various FlaglerLive commenters who think they know better. They don’t know better, they just don’t. I suspect that even if they did know better, they would still insist on killing them all. Vengeance would never permit knowledge to interfere with its demands (costs?) on the human soul.
Flatsflyer says
Should have been a death sentence to begin with. Possibly the sentence would have been carried out by now and all this grandstanding and acting would have been over and done with. Justice needs to be served quickly.
Celia M Pugliese says
Is non acceptably ridiculous the money and time wasted with such a cold blodded criminal even if mentally ill…He needs to remain in prison for life or get the death penalty for killing and innocent single mother of five while working the graveyard schedule to be able to have more than one job to sustain her five children on her own! These children growing up without their mom and probably splitted up among relatives or friends that came to their aid . This criminal not only ended Zuheiley’s life also undermined forever the lives of her five children one so young that now may have no memory of his mom.
tina tinsley says
This is death penalty sitch. Why all this bc he has rich ppl? She was my friend..a mother shot execution style. Someone can get a DUI in this town and is punished more harshly than this side show. Email the gov. He isn’t schitzo..he has rich family. He is a cold murderer..we have death penalty in my beloved state for a reason. Email deaantis this side show Yankee bullshit needs to end . #NotinFL
FlaglerLive says
Bova’s family is not and has not paid for his defense. He has been represented by public defenders, to the extent that he has allowed them to represent him. This latest turn in his case was the result of his insistence that he should have represented himself at trial. The governor has no say in this case, except if he chooses to pardon him, which is not likely.
Dee says
The system is broken how can you do this he will not take his meds and kill someone else what is wrong with you Are you willing to live with that he should be put away and throw away the key. I’m a nurse and these people think there are not sick they will not take there meds and kill again wake up court system
Robert says
He may act mentally ill when it is convenient for him but he sure knows how to scam the system. Life sentence is justified.
Greg Jolley says
Brillaint coverage by Flagler Live and a fine discussion.
Thank you,
Greg