South Carolina man who burned wife’s body won't be resentenced

RICHMOND, Va. (CN) — A South Carolina man who burned his wife’s body after killing her will not be resentenced, a Fourth Circuit panel found Thursday.

Lawrence Florentine was convicted of the second-degree murder of his wife, Nicole Zahnd Florentine, after pleading guilty in October 2023 to interstate domestic violence resulting in death, use of a firearm to cause death, obstruction of justice and use of fire during the commission of a felony. He is believed to have shot her in the head in South Carolina in June 2020, then transported her body to Kentucky, where he doused her with gasoline, set her body on fire and buried her remains in a shallow grave.

Florentine argued before the Fourth Circuit in December that he was unfairly given an extra 10 years in prison for burning her body despite not using fire in the murder.

The lower court had found that the crime of interstate domestic violence continued even after Nicole had passed, and that it was a continuing offense when Florentine set her body on fire. Florentine had used fire to commit a felony, it held, the crime of interstate domestic violence. He was sentenced to 30 years in prison.

The lower court denied Florentine’s motion to dismiss after he entered into a plea agreement, finding that crime of interstate domestic violence resulting in death is a continuing offense that isn’t inherently complete when the victim dies. The plea agreement carved out an exception that allowed Florentine to appeal an unfavorable ruling on the fourth charge in his case: the use of fire to commit a felony.

The lower court was wrong in allowing the use-of-fire charge to stand when Florentine asked to dismiss it, the Fourth Circuit panel said in its opinion Thursday.

“The crime of interstate domestic violence ends when a victim dies,” U.S. Circuit Judge Nicole Berner said in the panel’s 14-page opinion. “Because conduct undertaken to conceal a victim’s death after the fact lies beyond the reach of the interstate domestic violence statute, Florentine did not use fire to commit the felony of interstate domestic violence.”

But the three-judge panel disagreed that resentencing was necessary, pointing out that the lower court “repeatedly explained” that it would have imposed the same sentence even if it had dismissed the additional fire charge, due to Florentine’s desecration of his wife’s body. The panel remanded the case solely to amend the lower court’s judgment.

The government had argued that committing interstate domestic violence includes acts to evade law enforcement, and that burning Nicole’s body was an act of concealment. It had also asked that Florentine not be resentenced.

The government’s argument that interstate domestic violence can continue beyond the victim’s death fails to consider that once a person has died, they no longer continue to be a “spouse” or “partner” moving across state lines, Berner said. Moving a corpse across state lines falls outside the bounds of interstate transit in the domestic violence statute, the Joe Biden appointee noted.

During oral arguments, U.S. Circuit Judge G. Steven Agee pushed back on the government’s argument that interstate domestic violence continues even after the victim’s death.

“It just doesn’t seem to me to make sense that you can have this continuing crime to a corpse,” the George W. Bush appointee said.

Agee and U.S. Circuit Judge Stephanie Thacker, a Barack Obama appointee, joined Berner in the opinion.

A representative for the U.S. Attorney’s Office declined to comment. Counsel for Florentine did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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