TALLAHASSEE – Willie Nowell, sentenced to death for the murder of Michelle Gill and her unborn child, will get a new trial.

The Florida Supreme Court this morning ruled 4-1 that Nowell deserved a new trial because a prospective Hispanic juror was improperly dismissed and because the prosecutor made a forbidden appeal to jurors’ emotions.

Nowell was convicted and sentenced in the 2002 shooting death of Gill. Nowell and Jermaine Bellamy broke into the Palm Bay home of Kelvis Smith, forced Smith and Gill into a closet and shot them both with a "flurry of bullets." Smith survived. Bellamy was convicted in 2006 and sentenced to life in prison.

The murder of the pregnant Gill was sensational as police and prosecutors described a series of drug deals and retaliatory shootings. The 475-pound Smith, an aspiring rapper, survived to bullets in his head and picked out Nowell and Bellamy with sign language to police from his hospital bed.

Today, the court overturned Nowell's 2005 conviction, vacated his death sentence and ordered a new trial for two reasons.

* Keeping Nelson Ortega off the jury violated the state's inability to strike prospective jurors on the basis of race alone.

* The trial court should have backed up a defense objection to the prosecutor's closing arguments.

"We conclude that the State's race-neutral reasons were clearly pretextual and not genuine and the trial court therefore committed reversible error in allowing the State to exercise a peremptory challenge against Mr. Ortega," the court wrote in an unsigned opinion.

In closing arguments at the sentencing phase of Nowell's trial, the prosecutor told jurors they should show the defendant the same mercy he'd shown his victims. The court said that isn't allowed.

"We held that this line of argument is blatantly impermissible (in previous court rulings) which condemned these type of arguments because they are an unnecessary appeal to the sympathies of the jurors," the court wrote.