The Penalty Phase Opens: Three Families Speak, Two Defense Doctors Are Tested, And The Video Still Waits

Three friends went night fishing outside Frostproof, Florida, on July 17, 2020, and none of them came home. Brandon Rollins, Keven Springfield and Damion Tillman were killed near Lake Streety Road. On Day 10, Tuesday, September 29, 2026, a Polk County jury found Tony "TJ" Wiggins Jr. guilty of first-degree murder on all three counts. His brother, William "Robert" Wiggins, and his girlfriend, Mary Whittemore, were never tried for murder; each of them pleaded to accessory after the fact. The question this trial spent ten court days on, did he do it, has been answered by the twelve people whose job it was to answer it.

On Day 11, Thursday, October 1, 2026, those same twelve people came back to answer a harder one. The State of Florida is asking them to recommend that Tony Wiggins be put to death. The defense is asking them to recommend life in prison without the possibility of parole. That is the penalty phase. It opened with three families telling the jury who they lost, and then it turned, and the defense put the man the jury had just convicted back in front of them as a boy: hungry, dirty, beaten with a belt, moved from state to state, and looking up to a father who, by the father's own account to a defense psychologist, was "either working or he was high on drugs."

It was a long day, a little over eight hours on the record, and for most of it the tide ran one way. The State's whole case for death was in before lunch. The defense's case for life opened with two doctors, and by the time the jury went home the State had cross-examined both of them on the exact words of the Florida statute and walked away with a concession from each. And the single biggest piece of the defense case, a mitigation video about forty-seven minutes long, built from interviews with the people who raised him, sat on the bench from the first argument of the morning to the last scheduling talk of the night without a ruling.

That video is the question I want to carry through this piece, because I think it is the question Day 11 hands us. What does a fair fight over a man's life look like? The State has a real complaint about the video, and I am going to give it to you in the State's own words. The defense has a real complaint about how the day was sequenced, and the record supports it too. A jury deciding between life and death is supposed to weigh everything the law allows it to weigh. On Day 11 it weighed the State's evidence in full, and it weighed the defense's doctors after the State had taken them apart, and it has not yet been told whether it will ever see the piece of the defense case that the defense chose to put last.

The ground rules first, because on a day like this they matter more than usual. Everything below is the record of one court day and my read of it. An opening statement is a lawyer telling the jury what the lawyer expects to show; it is not evidence, and where a lawyer said something, I tell you a lawyer said it. A victim-impact statement is the speaker's own words, and I attribute every one of them. What the jury reaches at the end of this phase is a recommendation. The judge imposes the sentence. No juror is named in this piece, and none ever will be on anything we publish. And when I raise a question about the process, that is all it is. What this jury should recommend is its call.

From Did He Do It To What Does He Deserve

If you have only followed the guilt phase, the penalty phase can feel like a second trial, and in some ways it is. But it is built on a different frame, and the judge laid it out carefully once the jury was seated, so let me lay it out the same way.

"This is the beginning of the penalty phase of the trial," he told them. The jury had already found Wiggins guilty of three counts of first-degree murder. Now it has four questions in front of it, in order. First, did the State prove an aggravating factor beyond a reasonable doubt? An aggravating factor is a circumstance the law says can make a murder eligible for death. Second, is that aggravating factor sufficient to justify death? Third, does it outweigh the mitigating circumstances? A mitigating circumstance is anything about the defendant or the crime that a juror thinks weighs toward a lesser punishment, and the defense does not have to prove those beyond a reasonable doubt. It only has to prove them by "the greater weight of the evidence," which in plain English means more likely than not. And fourth, life or death.

The judge was blunt about how open the mitigation side is. A "mitigating circumstance can be anything," he told them, he told them.

Two more things the jury was told, and I want them on the record here because they shape everything that follows. On victim impact, the judge said the families' statements "must not be considered by you as an aggravating factor." And on how the jury's decision would be checked afterward, he anticipated a question jurors sometimes have about being polled. Nobody would ask them one by one how they voted: "did you vote for life? Did you vote for death? That's not how it works."

Under Florida law, a death recommendation takes at least eight of the twelve jurors. Anything short of that is a recommendation of life without parole. The penalty verdict form the lawyers were still working on at the end of the night, which the judge said he had revamped, asks the jury first to say whether it has unanimously found that the State proved an aggravating factor, then to consider the mitigating circumstances, then to make its recommendation. That recommendation goes to the judge. He sentences.

The shift in the question is the whole story of this phase. For ten court days this case turned on the brother and the girlfriend, on who held the gun and who only helped afterward, on whether the State's witnesses could be believed. All of that is settled for this jury now. What is left is a weighing: three lives on one side of a scale, and on the other side, whatever the defense can show the jury about the man, and how he came to be the man in that courtroom.

A Video Nobody Had Finished Watching

Before the jury came in, the lawyers spent the first stretch of the morning arguing about what the jury would be allowed to see. The jury was not in the room for any of it. I am reporting it because it is the part of the day that decides what this jury's picture of Tony Wiggins is going to look like.

Some of it was quick. The judge had drafts of the penalty-phase instructions from both sides, and they did not line up; the lawyers were, in the court's words, "not on the same page." The defense's draft still carried a second aggravating circumstance, and the judge understood the State had conceded that one was out. It is out. The State goes forward on a single aggravator. The judge then read the defense's proposed list of mitigating circumstances into the record, and the State's response was short: "I don't have an issue with any of that." The State named one exhibit for its own penalty case, a certified copy of the guilt-phase verdict form.

Then the defense exhibits. Defense Exhibit 1 was a PowerPoint built by the defense psychologist, Dr. Scot Machlus. Defense Exhibit 2 was a PowerPoint built by the defense neuropsychiatrist, Dr. Joseph Wu. Asked about each one, the State said it had no objection. Hold on to that, because it changes before the day is out. There were nine photographs of the defendant, too, running, as the State put it, "from what looks like you know, infancy through adulthood." The State objected to those: "I'm not sure what the relevance of those would be." There was no ruling on the photographs before the jury came in.

And there was Defense Exhibit 3, the mitigation video. Here is how the State described it to the judge. It is edited, "cut in sort of a news show type of format," where one person speaks and the video cuts to another who finishes the thought. On length, the State's lawyer corrected course mid-sentence and landed on "about 50 minutes, a little over 46, 7 minutes." Two of the people interviewed in it have died: the defendant's father, and a woman the State understood to be a relative. Three are living: the defendant's mother, a person on the case's witness list who is now in custody, and a man whose name the State's lawyer could not recall in the moment.

The State's objection was narrow, and I want to give it its full weight, because it is a serious one. On the two people who have died, the State said it was "fine with their interviews being played, even though I can't cross-examine them." On hearsay, the rule that generally keeps out secondhand statements, it said: "I don't have an issue with the you know the hearsay nature of what's going on." Its problem was the three living people. If their interviews are simply played and they never take the stand, the State said, it would be "boxed out of any sort of cross-examination, any sort of um, you know, impeachment based on prior record if exists." Impeachment is the process of attacking a witness's credibility, and a prior criminal record is one of the standard ways to do it. "That doesn't seem to be a very fair proceeding for the state to just present videos that we can't talk about."

But then the State told the judge something else, and the judge's reaction tells you what he made of it. The State said it had raised the issue with the defense "like the following day, after reviewing portions of it." And: "I haven't reviewed the entire video at this point, but it's pretty much the same throughout." The judge answered: "I'm not very sympathetic to what you just said." The State's lawyer answered that it was just being candid with the court, and the judge said he appreciated that.

The defense's answer was that the three living speakers are not being called live, that these were "interviews specifically focused on my client's background," that nothing in them would be irrelevant to this phase, and that every one of them has been on the witness list "if the state wants to want to talk to them." The defense also suggested the obvious: before the video comes into play at the end of the defense case, "perhaps the state can watch it in its entirety."

The judge did not rule. "Sounds like I probably need to see it." He said hearsay and cross-examination do not stop mattering in a penalty phase, but that the court has to "take into account it's a penalty phase." He said he might have to review the video and make a ruling on its admissibility. The exhibits were numbered, the jury was not all there yet, and the court took a fifteen-minute recess.

WATCH: DAY 11, PART 42 (THE VIDEO FIGHT), LIVE 9:00 AM ET FRIDAY, OCT 2 Frostproof Massacre State Objects to Tony Wiggins' Mitigation Video It Cannot Cross-Examine | Pt 42

So at the start of Day 11, the State was objecting to a video it said it had not finished watching, the judge said he probably needed to see it, and the jury was about to hear a full day of evidence with the defense's centerpiece unruled.

"This Is Your Courtroom"

When court came back, the judge relaxed the rule of sequestration, the order that keeps witnesses out of the courtroom while others testify, so that witnesses could sit in during the penalty phase. Then he turned to the gallery.

You have to remember what happened on Day 9. During the defense's closing argument, Cyril Rollins, Brandon's father, spoke out to the room. The court barred him from the courtroom for the rest of the trial, a defense motion for a mistrial followed and was denied, and two jurors were later excused for cause. This judge has already had to put this trial back together once. He was not going to leave anything to chance on Day 11.

People in the gallery, he said, may hear things that are difficult. "If you think you can handle it, this is your courtroom. If you think you cannot handle it, please excuse yourself." No talking. No reactions. No expressions of satisfaction or dissatisfaction. "I can tell you I would not tolerate any outbursts." And to the families, the victims' families and the defendant's family, sitting in the same room on the worst subject any of them will ever share: "Do not communicate with one another. It's not a good idea."

He said it again after lunch, in different words. Anyone overcome should step outside quietly; anyone who violates his instructions will be "excluded from the courtroom." He framed it as respect, for the jurors and for what both sides had done over "the last six years to get ready to this point."

I think he was right to do it, and he did it with care. A penalty phase asks a family that has waited six years to sit silently through a defense case about the childhood of the man convicted of killing their son, and asks a mother to sit silently while the State tells a jury her son should die.

One more fight happened before the jury came in, and it is the one I told you to hold on to. The State had understood the two PowerPoints to be demonstrative aids, visual material a witness uses on the stand to explain testimony, which does not go back to the jury room. It had now learned the defense intended to put them into evidence, which the State said would be the same as putting the doctors' reports into evidence. The defense answered that in a penalty phase, "obviously the rules of evidence are more lax." The judge split it: the slides could be shown while each doctor testified, and he would decide later whether they would go into evidence.

One Aggravator, Inherent In A Verdict

The State's opening was given by Assistant State Attorney Ralph Guerra, and it was short, because the law made it short.

The State alleges one aggravating factor: that the defendant was previously convicted of another capital felony. A capital felony is a crime that can carry death. In a single trial with three murder counts, Mr. Guerra told the jury, that factor is already settled by what they did on Day 10. For each victim, the State said, "look at the other two." The aggravator, in his words, is "inherent in your verdict, your previous verdict." And then: "We're not going to retry the case here."

He drew the legal line on victim impact himself, telling the jury it is not an aggravating factor and they may not treat it as one, and then he told them what it was for. The jury had come to know these three men through the evidence of a criminal investigation. "Brandon Rollins was more than evidence at a crime scene. Keven Springfield was more than a victim in an investigation. And Damion Tillman was more than blood on a seatbelt. They were people."

The defense opened next, and it did something you do not always see: it began by conceding ground. "We respect your verdicts," the defense told jurors. It agreed the aggravator flows from those verdicts while still holding the State to its burden. It did not run from the facts. "First degree murders have ugly facts," the defense said. The death penalty, the defense told the jury, is reserved for the worst of the worst, for "the most aggravated of murders and the least mitigated of murders." The whole question, in the defense's framing, is whether this is that.

Then it spoke to each juror individually, which is what a defense lawyer in a penalty phase is really doing. Mitigation does not need to be unanimous. Each juror weighs it alone. "Your recommendation to the court is yours and yours alone." And it told the jury that a recommendation of life is not a recommendation of mercy in the ordinary sense. Life without parole means exactly what it says. "He will die in prison." The defense closed: "Life in prison without the possibility [of parole] is the appropriate sentence."

Strip both openings down and here is where the case stood before a single witness: the State's legal case for death is, on its own terms, already proved by the verdict, and the defense said so. Everything left is in the weighing.

Who They Were

The State put the certified verdict form into evidence without objection. Then it called the families. I am going to give you their words at some length, attributed to each of them, because they are the record of Day 11 and because they are the part of this trial that the case files never had room for. They are not findings of the court, and the jury was told, twice, that they are not an aggravating factor. They are what these families wanted twelve strangers to know.

Dottie Payton, Brandon Rollins' mother, was sworn, spelled her name for the record, and read a statement she had written. Since that night, she said, she has been diagnosed with depression and emotional distress. "I have had sleepless nights with flashbacks." The family goes to the memorial site at Lake Streety to find comfort, and on the 17th of every month, for the past six years, they have gathered there with family and friends in Brandon's memory. Brandon loved fishing and hog hunting and training dogs. He had a job he loved and an employer who thought the world of him. He had bought a boat two weeks before he was killed, and he had plans for July 18, the day after, to take one of her young grandsons fishing in it. "That never happened." He was the last of her children still living at home. He had no children of his own, and she said she had hoped for more grandchildren and never will have them.

And then she said something I did not expect, about forgiveness. "Forgiveness doesn't mean erasing the memory of what has happened," she told the jury. It only means, she said, that her family is choosing to let go of the grudge while keeping the lesson intact, and that they will never forget what the past six years have put them through.

Mr. Guerra then read letters from Keven Springfield's family. His niece, Kelsey Meeks, wrote that she wanted to remember her uncle for the person he was, "not for the way his life was taken." He never called her by her name. It was always "Kells." She remembered summer mornings watching cartoons together with cups of coffee they were definitely too young to be drinking, mornings that seemed ordinary at the time. "I want everyone to know that his life mattered," she wrote. "He was loved."

His sister Angela Smith wrote that he was the kind of person who "would give you the shirt off his back," a great mechanic who always tried his best. "His kids miss him so much." He will never see his kids, nieces and nephews grow up, she wrote, and she will never see her baby brother again.

His sister Janice Mesey wrote about a brother who, in his early twenties, stayed close and came over to help around the house, and she was specific about what help meant: framing, hanging sheetrock, flooring, tiling showers. She taught him, and she would not trade those days for anything. "Keven will always be my baby brother," she wrote. All she can do now, she said, is look at old pictures and tell the kids and grandkids about their Uncle Keven.

Then the State called Brandon Rollins' niece. She took the oath and read her own words. When she first heard what happened, she said, she was in denial and heartbroken. "Brandon was not just my uncle. He was my best friend." She keeps thinking, she said, that he will be there at her grandmother's house to scare her when she walks in the front door. He missed her 15th birthday, she said, her graduation, the day she got her driver's license. "Brandon mattered and he was loved."

A letter from Brett Hanger, Brandon's friend, was read next. Hog hunting, fishing, countless hours laughing. And one detail that I suspect stayed with every juror in that box: "Brandon wearing his headlamp because he absolutely did not want to be in the dark." He closed with the hunting trips, the fishing trips, and Brandon and that headlamp, making sure he never had to sit in the dark. "I miss him and I always will."

The last to speak was Elizabeth Tillman, Damion's mother. She began at the beginning. "On June 26, 1997, I gave birth to my son Damion Tillman." He grew up with two younger sisters and rode horses with them. He and his father rode ATVs together. He loved fishing and camping, he always had a smile on his face, and he loved it when he got his job at Lowe's, because it let him help people. July 17, 2020, she said, was a nightmare. "Our lives will never be the same. You sit and wait for his smile and face to come in the door, but he doesn't."

WATCH: DAY 11, PART 43 (THE CHARGE, THE OPENINGS, THE FAMILIES), LIVE 11:00 AM ET FRIDAY, OCT 2 Frostproof Massacre Penalty Phase Opens As Families Tell Tony Wiggins' Jury Who They Lost | Pt 43

The defense did not object to any statement or letter, and it asked no questions of any family member. That was the right call and it was also the decent one.

The State Rests Before Lunch

And then: "State would rest."

That is worth pausing on. The State of Florida is asking a jury to recommend that a man be put to death, and its entire penalty-phase case, from the first word of its opening to resting, took about half an hour. One exhibit, the verdict form. One aggravator, conceded by the defense in its opening to be inherent in that verdict. And seven victim-impact statements and letters.

None of that is improper. The law allows a single aggravator to support a death recommendation if the jury finds it sufficient and finds it outweighs the mitigation. But it gives the phase a shape. The State's case is short, emotionally complete, and ends on the families: the last thing the State put in front of this jury was a mother waiting for a smile to come through the door. The judge and Mr. Guerra both told the jury that victim impact is not an aggravator, and that is the law. It was also the last evidence the jury heard before the day passed to the defense, and nobody who has sat on a jury believes those statements weigh nothing because an instruction says they cannot be counted as an aggravator.

The families had every right to be heard, and the State is allowed to present them. I raise it so you understand what the defense walked into after lunch.

The Boy In The DCF File

The defense case for life opened with Dr. Scot Machlus. He has been licensed as a psychologist in Florida since 1990 and board certified since 1995, and he said he has testified about 175 times. He described his field as "applying the principles of clinical psychology to matters of law." The defense hired him in late 2021 or early 2022 to find out whether mitigating circumstances applied to Tony Wiggins. He interviewed Wiggins at the jail twice, for five hours and forty-five minutes in January 2022 and three hours and fifteen minutes in December 2022. He reviewed sheriff's reports, school records, and records from the Department of Children and Families, juvenile justice and corrections. His only outside interviews were with the defendant's mother and father. Remember that last detail. It comes back.

His PowerPoint, Defense Exhibit 1, went up on the screen, and he started at the beginning. "TJ grew up in very impoverished conditions."

What followed was a childhood told in the order the records tell it. Parents who were not married and who both had histories of methamphetamine use, in a relationship he called very volatile. When TJ was eight, his mother's boyfriend moved into the household, and Machlus described an incident in which that man "stabbed TJ's father in the head with a fork." The boy moved among parents, relatives and friends in Florida, Georgia, Alabama and, Machlus believed, South Carolina for a time. Both parents told Machlus they beat him with a belt when he was small, and by about age twelve "there was very little discipline at all."

Then school. Special education from second grade. A learning disability. A repeated grade. Teachers who recommended ADHD medication, and parents who never followed up. Machlus's own testing put Wiggins in the average range of intelligence. The defense raised the obvious weakness itself: the adult ADHD tools he used rely on what the person reports. "A person can self-report anything," Machlus agreed, and then said the results matched the school records, the DCF records and what the parents told him, and he saw no sign Wiggins was faking.

And then the father. By the mother's account to Machlus, TJ's father "pushed TJ through a window to rob a house, and then split the proceeds with both boys." Machlus said TJ looked up to his father "big time." His summary was one line: "That was his hero."

His father, Machlus said, told him in his own interview that he was "either working or he was high on drugs," and slept for days at a time. Machlus described belt discipline until about twelve and then nothing at all, and he was clear that he saw both as harm. "And no discipline is maltreatment as well." At fifteen, he said, another of his mother's boyfriends used a metal belt on him, leaving bruises; DCF found indicators of abuse; and his mother's response was to send him out of the home to Georgia. Machlus described a boy "rejected by his mother and sent away." He wanted the jury to understand he was not describing ordinary discipline. "We're not just talking about a spanking."

Then he walked them through the DCF file, report by report, by the boy's age. Findings of neglect, of medical care not given. A mother called to the school because her son smelled so badly. In one report, Machlus said, the investigator wrote that TJ appeared "like a third world child," because his clothes did not fit him. At eight, a hungry boy taking food from other children's lunchboxes. A cut on his foot that went untreated. Food stamps canceled. And a report that his "dad was using meth every day."

WATCH: DAY 11, PART 44 (DR. MACHLUS BUILDS THE CHILDHOOD), LIVE 1:00 PM ET FRIDAY, OCT 2 Frostproof Massacre Defense Psychologist Says Tony Wiggins' Father Had Him Rob a House | Pt 44

Here is what made that stretch strong, and I want to be fair to it. Almost none of it rests on Tony Wiggins' word. The DCF reports are dated, official, and written by the State of Florida's own child-welfare investigators. The school records were written by teachers who had no idea that a murder case would be built years later. The harshest descriptions of that home came from his parents' own mouths. A juror who wants to dismiss all of this as a killer's sob story has to dismiss the State's own file on him as a child to do it. The jury went to lunch with Machlus still on direct.

"I'm Relating This To Why We're Here"

After lunch, Machlus finished the DCF file, including a report from when TJ was twelve describing a father too sick to work, a boy who was very dirty, and concern that the house had no water. He conceded some reports closed without findings, because parents skipped drug screens or investigators were not let into the home.

Then he did what an expert in this chair has to do, which is to connect the history to the question. "I'm not just going through a psychosocial history. I'm relating this to why we're here."

When TJ was five, Machlus said, his father, by the father's own account, went after another boy and "had him on the ground by the throat, and almost killed him." The lesson, Machlus told the jury, was that conflict gets handled through aggression and violence. The mother "chose her boyfriends over him." The father was there and not there: "He was working, he was high." His father got respect, Machlus said, and TJ found that exciting; people looked up to his father, "and it was like being on America's Most Wanted, which he saw as a positive thing." Growing up that way, he said, normalizes criminality and violence. He listed a family history of crime.

Then his headline number. There is a standard research checklist of ten adverse childhood experiences, ACEs for short. Machlus said Wiggins had seven of the ten, against one or two for Florida juveniles who stayed out of trouble and four or more for juvenile offenders. Treatment, he said, never came.

And then the opinion he was hired to give. Florida's statutory mitigating circumstance on this point asks whether the defendant's capacity "to appreciate the criminality of his conduct or to conform his conduct to the requirements of law was substantially impaired." There are two halves to that. One is understanding: did he know what he was doing was criminal? The other is control: could he make himself stop? Asked for his opinion, Machlus answered: "Yes, it was substantially impaired."

Two Prongs, And The State Took One

The State's cross-examination of Machlus came in short, hard steps, and it was built on the idea that a history is not a cause.

A person with good wiring and a stable family can commit crimes, the State established, and a person with a terrible childhood can live a lawful life. The State put it to him in its own words: "People with those characteristics, some commit those acts, some do not." The phrase "poor wiring" that Machlus had used on direct, he agreed, is "not a scientific term." His opinion is retrospective: he first met Wiggins about eighteen months after the killings. His full-scale IQ is 99, average. He was oriented and coherent. No doctor ever diagnosed him with ADHD.

And then the list, and this is the part of the cross I think matters most for anyone judging this process. Machlus had not reviewed the guilt-phase transcript. He had not reviewed the store video, the maps and routes and times, the phone records, the Facebook posts, the video of an ammunition purchase, the McDonald's video, or the defendant's letters from jail. The jury had spent ten court days on that evidence. The defense's expert on the defendant's state of mind had not looked at it. Asked whether the conduct the State had proved could be purposeful and goal-directed, he said: "Possibly."

Then the concession the State came for. The State read from Machlus's own report, which said the risk factors he identified "do not appear to have interfered with his wrongful awareness." Was that what he wrote? "Correct." Asked what that meant, he said: "The factual knowledge that his acts were wrong." And he agreed that Wiggins understands killing is against the law, and agreed, in answer to the State's question, that the killings were wrong.

That is the first prong of the statutory circumstance, and the State took it off the board using the defense expert's own written words. Understanding is gone. Whatever is left of the statutory circumstance now rests on control, on whether Wiggins could conform his conduct to the law.

On redirect, the defense brought out two things. Both Wiggins and his father had reported a paternal grandfather with paranoid schizophrenia. And collecting records for a boy who moved at least fifteen times in fifteen or sixteen years, Machlus said, is "extremely difficult." He was excused.

Then the ruling on his PowerPoint. The State's objection to Defense Exhibit 1 going into evidence was sustained, and "it will be part of the court file." The jury saw every slide while he testified. It will not have them in the deliberation room.

WATCH: DAY 11, PART 45 (MACHLUS CROSSED, DR. WU'S SCANS), LIVE 3:00 PM ET FRIDAY, OCT 2 Frostproof Massacre Defense Experts Say an Abusive Childhood Impaired Tony Wiggins' Brain | Pt 45

The Brake Line

The defense's second witness was its answer to exactly the problem the State had just exposed. Dr. Joseph Wu is a professor emeritus at UC Irvine who works in brain imaging, PET scans and quantitative MRI, and he said he has testified somewhere between 100 and 200 times. He was retained to read scans a neurologist had ordered. Where Machlus offered research probabilities, Wu offered measurements, and he went straight at the surviving prong: control.

His bottom line was that the scans show abnormalities "consistent with early childhood traumatic brain injury by the time [he] was age 12 or 13." He described an enlarged ventricle on the right side of the brain, about three standard deviations above the mean, which in plain English is well outside the normal range. He described decreased activity in the frontal regions that he put at "closer to 30%," and at 35 to 40 percent in places, far beyond the roughly five percent he associated with attention disorders. He dated the injury from a gap in processing speed on a childhood intelligence test. And he tied it to belt blows to the head, telling the jury that a belt buckle "can exceed a thousand Gs."

Then the images that will stay with this jury. A damaged frontal lobe, he said, is "like driving a car with a brake line's been cut." In this case, "the brake line for aggression has three or four cuts in it." He walked the jury through Phineas Gage, the famous 19th-century brain-injury case. He called what he saw in Wiggins "moral blindness that's neurological." He called the combination of the childhood and the brain "a perfect storm." And he gave the opinion the defense needed: that Wiggins was "neurologically incapable of uh conforming his behavior to the requirements of law."

It was the most concrete mitigation the jury heard all day. It also went on a long time. The jury took a break with his direct still running, and when it was out of the room the State complained it had been "40 minutes or so since Ms. Tuomey had asked a question," which it called "a little much." The judge said the defense would announce the end of direct when the jury returned.

Five Years And A Belt

The State's cross of Dr. Wu opened with two dates. The PET scan was taken on September 16, 2025. The killings were in July 2020. There is no image of Tony Wiggins' brain from the night of the crime. Wu's bridge across those five years was that "the scan for 2025 would be a reasonable estimate." Asked whether a 2020 scan would have shown the same thing, he answered: "I can't say that with 100% certainly, but I would say that more likely than not it would have been."

He agreed a scan "cannot record a person's thoughts." He agreed that "you can't tell from the scan by itself" when a difference in the brain arose. His first report was labeled preliminary and called for clinical correlation, meaning it needed to be checked against the person's actual history and symptoms, and it did not diagnose a traumatic brain injury. He reviewed no records of the homicides. He never spoke to the defendant or his family.

Then the State put the statute to him. Could a PET scan, in isolation, show that Wiggins' capacity to conform his conduct to the law was substantially impaired in 2020? He agreed it "in isolation can't." It cannot put a percentage on any impairment. The colors on his images are applied by a computer, and black on the map is a statistical flag, not dead or missing tissue. He accepted that radiology guidelines usually do not favor PET as the first imaging for brain injury, while saying those guidelines are written for emergency rooms and clinics.

And then the belt. This is the sharpest exchange of the day, and I want you to see it the way the record has it.

The State asked where Wu got the information that Wiggins was whipped with a belt. "Partly from the testimony of the uh previous witness," he said. It was not in his report. It was not in his deposition, the sworn pretrial questioning by the other side, which the State said took place the day before. "I was unaware of it yesterday." He had been sitting in the courtroom while Machlus testified. He said he was not assuming every blow landed on the head, but that in a rage some would. And if the belt landed only on other parts of the body, the State asked, that would not correlate to a brain injury? "That's true." He said there were other occasions of violence in a chaotic home that could account for an injury. "We just don't know. It could be anything."

Two more points from the cross. Wu had not seen the testing Machlus did in 2022, and he agreed 2022 is closer in time to 2020 than his own 2025 scan. And when the State asked whether there is any test for the "moral" processing he had described, he gave an answer the State is going to want to remember at closing: "There is no test for it, but but in terms of his behavior, in some sense behavior is the ultimate test."

On redirect, the defense established that Wu did not run the scans himself; a neurologist ordered them and forwarded them to him "for analysis."

My read, both ways. The State took apart the bridge between the scan and the night: a 2025 image, a "more likely than not" link to 2020, a cause that was not in his report, and his own answer that the scan alone cannot show what the statute asks. What the State did not touch is the scans themselves, and Wu never backed away from what he says they show. A juror who believes the images still has real mitigation, and the defense only has to prove it by the greater weight of the evidence.

And there is a question for the defense in this, too, which the defense will have to answer for itself. Its brain expert reached the head-injury cause partly from its own psychologist's testimony, on the stand, the same day, after a deposition in which it had not come up. That deposition fell on the day the judge described at the start of Day 11, when the parties had been "busy yesterday" with "discovery depositions and evaluations." This is discovery still happening while the trial is underway, and it is no way to have the most important causal link in your case to arrive in front of a jury.

Kept Out Of The Jury Room

Between Wu's direct and his cross, with the jury out, the judge settled the second PowerPoint. The State said it did not object to Wu's slides as a demonstrative but did object to them going back with the jury, and it pointed in part to photographs in the deck of "a man holding a child's hand" that it said had nothing to do with this case. The judge: "I will sustain the state's objection to number two also, and it will be filed as a court exhibit."

He made a record of why. Both doctors, he said, had access to their slides, and the PowerPoints were "continuously uh uh published to the jury uh without any interruption." In other words: the jury saw every slide while each doctor explained it. It will not have them to look at again when it deliberates.

Taken alone, that is a defensible ruling. A PowerPoint is a witness's summary of his own testimony, and sending it to the jury room can give one witness's version a second turn that the other side's evidence does not get. But notice the direction it runs. On Day 11, the State's one exhibit, the certified verdict form, went into evidence without objection. The defense's two expert exhibits are in the court file. The photographs of the defendant from infancy to adulthood had no ruling before the jury came in. And the video is not ruled on at all. Early in the morning, asked about the two PowerPoints as numbered exhibits, the State said it had no objection. Before the jury was even seated, it was objecting to both going into evidence, and it won both.

Any single one of those rulings can be defended. Taken together, they raise a question: a jury weighing life against death should go into that room with as much of the defense's picture as the law allows, and on the record of Day 11, the defense's picture has been getting smaller.

The Woman Who Took Him In

The defense's third witness of the day was not an expert. Mary Karns was with the defendant's father for about eight years. She is not Mary Whittemore, the girlfriend who pleaded to accessory after the fact; Mary Karns is the father's former girlfriend, and she met TJ when he was about twelve.

She described the houses. The first trailer, she said, "was actually clean," with power and water, but there was "no food in the house." His father was sick and could not work. TJ, she said, was "a good kid." They went fishing. He was sometimes "a little [de]pressed." A later trailer was "kind of falling down and was dirty." She saw the father use drugs, but not, she thought, in front of the boy.

And then the part that stayed with me. When his father went to jail and his mother could not take him, she and her own mother took TJ in. They bought him school clothes, a tie and khakis. "He done really good," she said. She said he was "like my own kid." Asked how he seemed during that time, she said he was "sad and a little unhappy still," and then she broke down on the stand.

Asked whether she knew of any injuries, she said maybe from four-wheelers, "nothing serious enough to get in a hospital."

The State asked her nothing. "No, Your Honor."

WATCH: DAY 11, PART 46 (WU CROSSED, MARY KARNS, THE VIDEO STILL UNRULED), LIVE 5:00 PM ET FRIDAY, OCT 2 Frostproof Massacre State Tests TJ Wiggins' Brain Scan but Asks His Father's Ex Nothing | Pt 46

I think the State's silence there was a choice, and I think it was a smart one, and I think it cuts in a way worth naming. Karns was the most human witness the defense called all day: a boy with nothing in the refrigerator who did well when somebody looked after him. Cross-examining a crying woman about a child she took in would have done the State no good. But Karns' own testimony also cut against parts of the defense case. Her first home was clean, with the lights and water on. And the only injuries she knew about were from four-wheelers, nothing that sent him to a hospital, on the same day the defense's brain expert told the jury the injury he saw most likely came from blows to the head. The State left that sitting in the record without having to touch it. That is a cross-examination by silence, and it worked.

Still Unruled

The jury was sent home with instructions to be back at 8:45 the next morning. Then the lawyers turned to scheduling, and the video came back.

The defense said it had six more witnesses, three of them appearing remotely from different time zones, about three hours in all, with the video last. The defense said it hoped the State had watched it by now, "but that's about 47 minutes long." The judge told the State that to the extent it needed to finish viewing the video, it would do so.

The State then renewed its objection, and I want to quote it closely because it is the clearest statement of the State's position all day. It said it was objecting to the video "just because I haven't finished the last few minutes it doesn't mean" it should be kept from objecting. "I didn't listen just the last few minutes," it said, but "from what I did review," it would be okay with the father's interview because the father has passed away, and it did not see any reason why any other person on the video should be allowed to testify "and not subject to cross examination."

Notice the shift. In the morning, the State said it was fine with two deceased speakers. At night it named one. Whether that is a narrowing of its position or just shorthand at the end of a very long day, the record does not say.

And the judge set the plan. Court would start early, at eight o'clock, he said, "because I want to listen to it, I want to view it and watch it."

So when the lights went off on Day 11, neither the State nor the judge had watched the whole video, and the judge planned to watch it at eight o'clock on Day 12. In between, the jury heard the State's entire penalty case, all seven victim-impact statements and letters, and both defense doctors with their cross-examinations, and the court ruled both sets of slides out of the jury room.

Now, the fair version of this, both directions, because this is where the watchdog standard actually lives.

The State's objection is legitimate. The confrontation of witnesses is a cornerstone of how we test evidence in this country, and a party that is told it will face three living people's recorded words, with no chance to question them about their records or their stories, has a real grievance. In a penalty phase, Florida's rules on hearsay are looser, but the State's argument was never about hearsay. It waived that. Its argument was about cross-examination, and the judge himself said those concepts still apply in a penalty phase.

And the cross-examination point cuts both ways in this trial, which is something I think a fair reader should hold onto. On the record we carried, the defendant's brother, William "Robert" Wiggins, who pleaded guilty to accessory after the fact under a plea agreement, took the stand on Day 6 only with the jury out of the room, and the State did not call him in front of the jury after that. The jury convicted without ever hearing the brother questioned by either side in its presence. That was the State's choice, and it was a legal one. But the State is now standing on the value of cross-examination to keep the defendant's mother's interview away from the same jury. Both of those things can be true at once. Both belong on the record together.

The defense's grievance is also legitimate. The judge told this jury that a mitigating circumstance "can be anything." The State did not object to the wording of the defense's mitigation list. The speakers in the video are listed witnesses the State was free to talk to. The State told the court it raised the issue with the defense the day after it received the video, after reviewing portions of it, and as of the end of Day 11 it still had not watched the whole thing. A ruling on the single largest piece of the defense's mitigation case, the one piece built around the voices of the people who raised him, did not come before the jury heard the two defense experts taken apart. Whatever the judge decides on Day 12, the jury will have spent a full day forming its picture of Tony Wiggins without it.

Is that a fair fight? I think the honest answer is that the record does not show anyone acting in bad faith, and it does show a sequence that has not been kind to the defense. Should a ruling on the defense's centerpiece have waited until after the jury had heard both of its doctors tested? I would have liked to see it ruled on the morning it was raised, either way, which would have meant the court and the State watching it before the day began, so that the defense could build its day around the answer. That is a question about the process, and it is the one I will be watching on Day 12.

What The Record Leaves Standing

Let me put Day 11 together, without telling you what this jury should do.

The State's aggravator is proved on its own terms; the certified verdicts supply it and the defense conceded as much. The defense proved the childhood, on records that are very hard to dispute, and the judge read every item of that mitigation to the jury. What the defense did not hold on Day 11 is the statutory circumstance: Machlus's own report took away the understanding prong, and Wu's cross left the control prong resting on a 2025 scan that, in his words, "in isolation can't" show impairment in 2020.

And here are the questions this record leaves standing, in both directions.

Neither of the defense's two doctors reviewed the record of the crime this jury convicted on. Machlus said so on cross, item by item. Wu reviewed no records of the homicides at all. The defense put up two experts on the defendant's mind and brain, and neither looked at what the defendant was proven to have done. That is a choice the defense made, and the State made it hurt.

The State, for its part, did not call a doctor of its own on Day 11. Its answer to two defense experts was cross-examination alone. That is a legal and often effective strategy, and it means that what the jury heard about Tony Wiggins' brain on Day 11 came only from the defense's expert, tested only by questions.

Both defense PowerPoints were shown in full and then kept out of the jury room. The State's one exhibit goes back with the jury. The rulings are defensible. The asymmetry is real.

The jury was told twice that victim impact is not an aggravator, and victim impact was the last evidence the State put in before it rested. The instruction is the law. Whether twelve people can fully follow it is a question the law has always had to live with.

And the defense's largest piece of mitigation, the video, is still unruled, with the State on record that it had not finished watching it and the judge on record that he wanted to.

I make no claim that this jury will get it wrong. These are the conditions this recommendation is being reached under, and they belong on the record beside whatever the recommendation turns out to be. A jury's view of a case is limited to what a judge lets in. In a penalty phase, where the question is the whole of a man's life, that limit is the story.

Where Day 11 Leaves The Case

Three men went fishing on a July night in 2020. A jury has said who is responsible. Now that same jury is being asked to weigh their lives, as their families described them, against the life of the man it convicted, as the defense is trying to describe it. Day 12 opens with the judge in early to watch the video, then six more defense witnesses, three of them remote, and then, if the judge lets it in, the forty-seven minutes the defense has been holding for last. After that come closing arguments, the instructions, and a recommendation, which goes to the judge. He decides the sentence.

Watch Part 42 first; the fight over that video frames the whole day. Part 43 is the families, in their own voices. Parts 44 through 46 are the defense case and the State's answer. The No Breaks Edition has the whole day without the waiting, and the Day 11 Top Moments premiered Friday, October 2, at 6:00 AM ET.

WATCH: DAY 11, NO BREAKS EDITION (THE WHOLE DAY) THE FROSTPROOF MASSACRE Day 11, No Breaks Edition: Penalty Phase, Families Speak, Doctors Testify WATCH: DAY 11 TOP MOMENTS THE FROSTPROOF MASSACRE - FL v. Tony Wiggins - Day 11 Top Moments: The Fight For His Life

Follow every Part of this trial in order in the Frostproof Massacre Trial Analysis Podcast playlist, and tell me in the comments: should the judge have ruled on that video before the jury heard the defense's doctors, and should the State be able to keep it out because it cannot cross-examine the people in it? We are staying with this case through the recommendation.