A former ballerina who was convicted of manslaughter in what she claimed was the self-defense killing of her estranged husband was sentenced Tuesday to 20 years in prison.
Circuit Court Judge Mathew Whyte said that while he believed Ashley Benefield, 33, had acted under duress and shown remorse for the fatal shooting of Doug Benefield, 58, at her Florida home on Sept. 27, 2020, she did not deserve a reduced sentence.
Lawyers for Ashley Benefield, who faced a maximum sentence of 30 years, had sought a lesser punishment. Whyte also sentenced her to 10 years of probation.
Ashley Benefield remained expressionless when Whyte announced the penalty.
After Tuesday's hearing, Doug Benefield's relatives said that while they disagreed with the judge's finding that Ashley Benefield had shown remorse, they believed her punishment was fair.
"I've waited so long to speak to her, face to face," said Doug Benefield's daughter, Eva Benefield, who read a victim impact statement during the hearing. "I hope prison serves her well."
Prosecutors in Florida’s 12th Judicial District, south of Tampa, had charged her with second-degree murder. A jury acquitted her after a six-day trial this summer but found her guilty of the lesser crime of first-degree manslaughter.
In trial testimony, she described her husband as controlling and volatile, with a history of abusive behavior. She testified that she fatally shot him after an argument at her home escalated into a physical altercation that she said made her fear for her life.
A prosecutor called the abuse allegations “fictitious” and said the physical evidence in the shooting didn’t match Benefield’s account of the altercation.
The prosecutor, Suzanne O’Donnell, alleged that Benefield shot her husband during a contentious battle that she sought to win “at all costs.”
She had previously sought injunctions that would have barred him from seeing their young child.
She filed one in 2018 after he appeared to have violated a no-contact order they had obtained against each other, she testified, but a judge denied the injunction, saying she didn’t find the claims credible.
Benefield sought a second injunction in 2020 that accused her husband of child abuse. He was not charged with any crimes in connection with the allegations, and the proceedings were ongoing at the time of his death.
Benefield’s lawyers had sought a new trial alleging juror misconduct. According to the filing, one juror failed to disclose that she had been in a custody dispute with an ex-husband who had accused her of abusive behavior — facts that the filing said mirrored the prosecution's theory about Benefield and would have raised concerns about the juror's ability to serve impartially.
The filing suggests another juror may have had a cellphone in the jury room and shared details of the deliberations with a person who claimed a sibling snuck in a phone and was relaying real-time information about the case to him.
The person then posted that information on a news site under the handle "That Hoodie Guy," according to the filing.
In an order posted Tuesday, Whyte, the judge, denied the defense's request, saying he interviewed each of the jurors and found that none admitted having a phone during deliberations, nor did any recall seeing a device being used during deliberations.
And Whyte blamed the defense team for not asking follow-up questions during jury selection. During that section of the trial, he wrote, the potentially impartial juror responded affirmatively to a question about domestic abuse, but Ashley Benefield's defense lawyers did not follow up on the matter.
