FL v. Courtney Clenney

Courtney Clenney was arrested in Hawaii on August 10, 2022, and charged with second-degree murder in the death of her boyfriend, Christian Obumseli, in a Miami high-rise apartment. On August 10, 2026, four years to the day, she will be sentenced. In all four of those years, she never had a trial.

That is the fact this coverage is built around. Not one juror was ever selected. No opening statement was ever delivered. She was denied bond at every hearing and sat in a Miami-Dade jail cell the entire time, waiting for a trial date that was set, continued, reset, and finally overtaken by a plea agreement reached on July 31, 2026. The terms of that agreement stayed sealed until court.

What makes this case worth your attention is what got given up. Over four years her lawyers built an unusually aggressive attack on the prosecution: that police ordered a civilian witness to delete his photographs of the scene before investigators arrived, that the State failed to disclose a witness who would have helped her, and, not as an allegation but as a judicial finding, that Miami-Dade prosecutors read the defense team's own privileged strategy document. Two weeks after that ruling, a set of related criminal charges collapsed. A year later the lead prosecutor left the case rather than answer questions under oath about what he had seen.

She pleaded guilty anyway. So the question of whether the system cheated her is now a question no jury will ever answer. Christian Obumseli was 27 years old, a former college linebacker from Dallas whose family has waited four years and four months for someone to say out loud what happened to him. On Monday they finally will. We will be there for all of it, live, and we will not tell you what her sentence should be before a judge decides it. Start with the background report below.

Live coverage of the plea and sentencing hearing begins August 10, 2026 at 10:00 AM Eastern before Judge Andrea Ricker Wolfson in Miami-Dade County. Check back here as it unfolds.