Protesters against the death penalty gather near the Florida State Prison before an execution in June 2014. (Matt McClain/ The Washington Post)
Just seven months after Florida revamped its death penalty law, the state’s Supreme Court struck down the new statute as unconstitutional because it does not require juries to be unanimous about handing down the sentences.
With a pair of rulings Friday, the Florida Supreme Court further added to the uncertainty surrounding the death penalty in the state, one of the country’s leading practitioners of capital punishment and home to the second-biggest death-row population nationwide. Florida’s death penalty has been in flux this year thanks to a series of court rulings that left unclear what will happen to the nearly 400 inmates still on the state’s death row.
The Florida Supreme Court’s decision also marks the second time this year that a court has struck down the state’s death-sentencing statute. The U.S. Supreme Court struck down the state’s old law as unconstitutional in January because it allowed judges, not juries, to make the final decision about imposing capital sentences.
In response to the high court’s ruling, Florida enacted a new measure in March that said jurors must unanimously agree that a case involves at least one aggravating circumstance necessary to warrant a death sentence. The new death-penalty law also increased the number of jurors needed to approve a death sentence, pushing it to 10 jurors from the seven previously needed.
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The ruling came down in a case brought by Timothy Lee Hurst, convicted of the 1998 murder of Cynthia Lee Harrison, his co-worker at a Popeyes fast-food restaurant in Pensacola. He also brought the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, leading to the justices striking down Florida’s death penalty earlier this year.
Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R), who signed the new law earlier this year. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
In addition, the Florida Supreme Court handed down another rulingregarding the state’s new death penalty law on Friday. In that case, Perry v. Florida, the justices declared that the updated death penalty statute could not be constitutionally applied to pending prosecutions because it does not require unanimous juries.
A spokesman for Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi (R) said her office was still looking over the ruling handed down Friday.
“We are reviewing the Florida Supreme Court ruling, but in the meantime Florida juries must make unanimous decisions in capital cases as to the appropriateness of the death penalty,” the spokesman said.
The office of Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) was also reviewing the ruling, a spokeswoman said Friday afternoon.
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This ruling comes as the death penalty nationwide continues to decline, with fewer executions and death sentences from coast to coast. While some states have struggled to obtain the drugs needed to carry out lethal injections, others have put executions on hold due to court rulings or because of ongoing reviews prompted by mistakes in their processes. And a poll recently found that for the first time in more than four decades, American support for the death penalty dropped below 50 percent.
Even as a declining number of states carry out executions, Florida is among the last bastions of capital punishment. Florida has carried out at least one execution each year since 2008, joining only Texas on that list, according to records kept by the Death Penalty Information Center. The state’s death row is also larger than that of any state other than California, which has not carried out an execution since 2006.
Since the U.S. Supreme Court ruling regarding Florida in January, questions have swirled around whether it was retroactive and would lead to hundreds of death-row inmates receiving life sentences. During a hearing in the Hurst case in May, some of Florida’s justices expressed concerns about whether the state’s rewritten sentencing statute provided constitutional protections to people facing potential death sentences.
A group of high-profile legal figures and groups in Florida — including three former chief justices of the Florida Supreme Court — have argued that people sentenced under the old statute should be re-sentenced to life in prison. Bondi’s office has argued against this and said that the higher court’s ruling only impacted “a portion” of the sentencing statute, rather than the entire death penalty.
“The Florida Supreme Court’s ruling that jury recommendations for the death penalty must be unanimous is a long overdue recognition of the state’s fatally flawed capital punishment regime,” Mary Anne Franks, a professor with the University of Miami School of Law, said in a statement released Friday.
The uncertainty had extended into Alabama, which allows judges to overrule jury recommendations. An inmate there had argued earlier this year that Alabama’s system was “virtually identical” to the one in Florida, but the U.S. Supreme Court denied his appeals and he was executed in January.
Alabama’s Supreme Court ruled last month that the state’s death-penalty system was constitutional and unaffected by the ruling that struck down Florida’s old statute earlier this year.
This story, first published at 12:42 p.m., has been updated.