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Oba Chandler is on death row for the 1989 murders of a woman and her two daughters.
By Times staff writer
© St. Petersburg Times, published June 29, 2001
ST. PETERSBURG -- A Pinellas-Pasco circuit judge on Thursday rejected Oba Chandler's appeal asking that his 1994 convictions and death sentences for the murder of an Ohio woman and her two daughters be thrown out.
Judge Susan Schaeffer said Chandler's argument that he received ineffective counsel at trial from Fred Zinober was flawed.
"Mr. Zinober ... gave Mr. Chandler all he had to offer, and he had plenty to offer," Schaeffer said in her ruling. "He was and is one of Pinellas County's finest lawyers. ... His trial performance was exemplary."
The decision will automatically be reviewed by the Florida Supreme Court. The bodies of Joan Rogers, 36, and her daughters, Michelle, 17, and Christe, 14, were found floating 2 miles from the Pier in June 1989. They had been stripped from the waist down, bound and gagged. They had been on vacation from their Ohio dairy farm. Chandler got them out on his boat, tied and gagged them, raped them, tied weights to their necks and tossed them into the bay.
Among other claims, Chandler argued that Zinober advised him to invoke his Fifth Amendment right to remain silent when prosecutors asked him about the rape of a Canadian tourist on his boat just weeks before the murders. He invoked the Fifth 21 times when he took the stand at trial.
Chandler, 54, said he should have been allowed to testify that his sex with the Canadian woman was consensual.