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TALLAHASSEE - Angel Diaz, a murderous prison escapee and suspected member of the ''Machete Men'' Puerto Rican terror gang, made one of his last appeals Thursday to the Florida Supreme Court claiming he was sentenced wrongly to die for his role in the 1979 murder of the manager of a Miami topless lounge.
At the heart of his appeal: ''Jail house snitch'' Ralph Gajus signed an affidavit recanting some of his trial testimony identifying Diaz as the shooter in the murder-robbery at the Velvet Swing lounge on Southwest Eighth Street.
But through their questions, the justices seemed to agree with prosecutors and a lower court judge that Gajus' recantation wasn't really new or outcome-changing.
''The alleged recantation is nothing more than semantics,'' Justice Charlie T. Wells said, reading from a trial-court ruling. ``And it certainly appears to me, from my reading of it, that it's correct.''
Diaz's lawyer, Suzanne Meyers Keffer, said Gajus' affidavit was important because it contradicted statements used to justify sentencing Diaz, now 58. Diaz is scheduled to be executed Dec. 13 by lethal injection, which he says is an unconstitutionally cruel punishment. Amnesty International and some politicians and activists in Puerto Rico have called for a commuted sentence as well.
Neither Diaz nor two other suspects was clearly identified as the shooter. A topless dancer who ducked behind the bar and customers forcibly locked in the bathroom didn't get a clear look at the gunman, who fired enough shots to graze the reflective disco ball.
Diaz left a fingerprint on a matchbook left at the scene.
The case grew cold for four years, and police focused attention elsewhere as the cocaine wars raged in Miami, making it such a violent city at one point that machine guns were suspected to account for a quarter of all murders.
A break in the Velvet Swing case came when Gajus was jailed in 1984 for an unrelated killing. He said Diaz was on the same floor as he, and discussed by hand gestures and in broken English the killing of Joseph Nagy at the Velvet Swing. Gajus now says he improperly inferred that Diaz was the shooter because he was angry Diaz excluded him from a jail escape plan.
Diaz had been serving a life term in his native Puerto Rico after stabbing to death a drug rehabilitation director in prison, where Diaz was incarcerated for bank robbery. He then escaped, wound up in a Connecticut prison where he skipped out, and then came to Miami. An accomplice, Angel Toro, pleaded guilty to the Velvet Swing killing.
''There are cases where the murder itself cries out for the ultimate punishment. Then there are other murders where the person himself, like Angel Diaz, cries out for the death penalty,'' Diaz's original prosecutor, John Kastrenakes, told The Miami Herald Thursday.
Kastrenakes said Diaz, nicknamed Papá de la muerte -- ''Daddy of Death'' -- in his Machete Men gang, had impeded the case from the start. He fired his lawyer at one point and represented himself in court, and he threatened witnesses. Court security was unusually strict, with guards searching witnesses and jurors before entering court, which was equipped with bullet-proof glass to protect the judge.
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