He raped a girl before killing her and her sister in Broward. He’s on his way back to death row

A man who was found guilty decades ago of raping an 11-year-old girl in front of her seven-year-old sister and then strangling both girls and dragging their bodies to his attic will be executed, a jury in the US state of Broward decided on Thursday.

After a vote of 9 to 3, the jury decided to send Howard Steven Ault back to Florida’s death row for a third time. The 57-year-old was convicted again for the murders of 11-year-old DeAnn Emerald Mu’min and 7-year-old Alicia Sybilla Jones in 1996. He had lured the two to his duplex in Fort Lauderdale with the promise of Halloween candy.

Ault’s fate depended on just eight jurors after Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a law last April allowing jurors to recommend the death penalty by an 8-4 vote rather than unanimously. DeSantis pushed for the law change after the Parkland school shooter who killed 17 people in 2018 was spared the death penalty in 2022.

Under current law, a jury must unanimously find that the prosecution has proven at least one aggravating factor beyond a reasonable doubt. It must also find that those factors outweigh mitigating circumstances that provide context about the defendant that could be used to argue against the death penalty.

READ MORE: Convicted child killer faces death penalty again in Broward. Is it the last time?

Ault’s re-sentencing came after the Florida Supreme Court granted the death row inmate a new sentencing hearing in 2017. The court had ruled that Florida’s death penalty process was unconstitutional because it did not require a unanimous jury decision.

At the original verdict in 2000, the jury voted to send Ault to the electric chair. But three years later, the Florida Supreme Court ordered a re-sentencing because of concerns about jury selection at Ault’s trial.

Life or death for a “violent sex offender”?

At the beginning of his closing argument on Wednesday, prosecutor Stephen Zaccor addressed the jury and listed a series of crimes linked to Ault. sexual abuse of a minor in 1994. Another in 1995. The rape and murder of DeAnn in 1996 and the killing of her sister Alicia.

Ault, Zaccor said, had been described by a defense attorney as a “violent sex offender,” a diagnosed pedophile who posed a danger to children. But Ault’s actions, Zaccor argued, went beyond that.

“What is it about pedophilia that makes you put your hands around an eleven-year-old’s throat and squeeze until she dies?” Zaccor asked. “And then you do the same to her sister?”

Ault had a plan that ultimately led to the double murder, Zaccor said. He hung out in a park, befriended a mother in distress and gained her trust – and that of DeAnne and Alicia – to “fulfill his desire to have children.”

He even confessed to the events leading up to the murders, telling a detective he lured her to rape 11-year-old DeAnn. But his plan, Zaccor said, changed because he didn’t want to get caught since he was on probation. So he shoved their bodies in the attic and threw their backpacks in a dumpster.

For Zaccor, a life sentence would avoid Ault suffering “additional punishment.” It’s almost like letting him go free, since he’s already serving a life sentence for the 1995 sexual assault.

“Don’t lose sight of one thing,” Zaccor said. “There is one person who could have prevented DeAnn and Alicia’s deaths. Just one. And he’s sitting at that table in a red jumpsuit.”

Defense attorney Lien Lafargue pleaded with jurors to spare Ault’s life, showing a photograph of him as a baby. The evidence presented, she said, painted a holistic picture of the “mentally broken” man who murdered the two girls decades earlier.

Lafargue reported testimony that said Ault’s father was physically violent; his mother was an alcoholic and looked the other way while he was sexually abused. Ault, she said, was born with a brain damaged by fetal alcohol syndrome and was born into a family that neither loved nor protected him.

Ault, she said, is an example of how an abused child develops into an abuser. But while that neither excuses nor justifies his actions, she urged jurors to consider it.

“A death sentence will not bring these two little girls back,” Lafargue said. “It will certainly not ease the pain of this family.”

Ault showed remorse when he confessed his crimes to investigators, Lafargue told the jury. He told investigators he had hidden the girls’ bodies in his attic – and that he needed to be locked up where he couldn’t hurt anyone.

“Every single reason I have given you is a reason to spare his life because he is a damaged man,” Lafargue said. “Show the mercy he has not shown to these victims.”