"Till death do us part" is a common inclusion in wedding vows, serving as a promise that the marriage will see the couple together until one of them shuffles off this mortal coil. As the divorce rate hovers around 41% for first marriages (and much higher for subsequent nuptials), it's clear that this vow can be somewhat aspirational for many of us. Things can become even more grim when a spouse decides that neither old age nor a divorce attorney is the answer.
There is no doubt that Lawrence Joseph Florentine (Larry) killed his wife, Nicole, as he entered a guilty plea and received a sentence of 360 months in a district court. However, Florentine appealed one of the charges, claiming that while the interstate domestic violence law applied to the murder of his wife, an additional conviction for burning her corpse didn't.
On August 7, 2025, a panel from the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals gave Florentine a pyrrhic victory. While the judges agreed that the district court had misapplied the law regarding the posthumous incineration, they denied his request for a resentencing hearing. This was based on the lower court noting several times that Florentine would have received the same sentence regardless of the final count, which had become a source of contention during attempts to agree on a plea bargain.
Definitely Not a Match Made in Heaven
Given the warning signs, Nicole's murder was hardly a surprise. Beginning in 2019, the South Carolina resident made numerous calls to 911, accusing her husband of domestic violence and threatening to kill her, burn her, and bury her. Florentine was arrested twice on domestic violence charges, but little did anyone realize that his threats were actually a playbook.
In May 2020, he sent pictures and texts as he claimed to be the cause of the fire that destroyed their home. Less than two months later, Nicole's burned corpse was discovered in a shallow grave in a graveyard in Kentucky. The couple had left South Carolina on June 3, 2020, driving into North Carolina before ending up in Kentucky.
Caught on video buying a shovel and a gas can near the burial site, Florentine left the can near his wife's grave. The clerk who sold him the items remembered him due to how bitterly he'd complained about the price of the gas can. Florentine was captured in Colorado on June 23.
According to his plea deal, Florentine admitted to shooting his wife in the head and killing her in North Carolina at some point before June 10. Before that, in 2022 he moved to have the murder charges in Kentucky against him dismissed, claiming that the state didn't have jurisdiction because the murder had occurred in South Carolina. Citing interstate domestic violence and firearm laws, the states requested that the case be federally prosecuted instead.
After some legal back-and-forth that included the acceptance and a later threat to withdraw his plea agreement, in April 2024, Florentine was sentenced to 240 months in prison for interstate domestic violence resulting in the death of his wife, use of a firearm during a crime of violence, and obstruction of justice, to be served concurrently. The court also imposed an additional 120 months to be served consecutively for the use of fire to commit interstate domestic violence, as mandated by the Violence Against Women Act of 1994 (VAWA).
At the sentencing hearing, the district court judge stressed that if the charge of use of fire to commit interstate domestic violence had been removed from the plea, the penalties for the other three charges would have been increased to reach the same 30-year sentence. This would still have been within the sentencing guidelines for those crimes.
Losing by Winning
In his plea deal, Florentine had negotiated the right to appeal the use of fire to commit interstate domestic violence charge. He wasted little time before filing to challenge it to get the 10 years removed. While his plea confirmed he'd crossed state lines before shooting and killing Nicole, he argued that since she was already dead when he burned her body, she was no longer his wife. Therefore, he couldn't be guilty of the felony required for burning his wife as an act of domestic violence.
As there was no specific applicable instance of precedent to draw on, the Fourth Circuit was forced to determine a precise interpretation of whether or not the VAWA statute covered a corpse. Their decision conceded that there must be an endpoint to VAWA's protections, and death qualified. While that allowed Florentine to win by the letter of the law, any sense of victory was gutted by the panel's acceptance of what the district court's sentence would have been without the fourth charge. Denying him a resentencing hearing, the panel reversed and remanded lower court's ruling.
Florentine may choose to continue his perhaps quixotic quest to overturn those 10 years. He has at least the next 20 years in prison to try.
Related Resources
- Appealing a Court Decision or Judgment (FindLaw's Litigation and Appeals)
- Domestic Violence Law and Resource Center (FindLaw's Family Law)
- State Domestic Violence Laws (FindLaw's Learn About the Law)
