Florida Supreme Court Could Throw Out Every Single Death Sentence in the State

0
472

Florida has hundreds of inmates on its death row and is among the states most persistent with capital punishment. But a group of former Florida Supreme Court justices, elected officials, prosecutors and a federal judge said this week that the state needs to overturn every one of those death sentences and replace them with life in prison.

Earlier this year, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Florida’s unique system of imposing death sentences, which the justices deemed unconstitutional because it let judges, rather than juries, make the final decision. In response, Florida formally revamped its death penalty, an overhaul aimed at letting the state resume executions and, as Gov. Rick Scott, R, said when he signed the changes into law, “allow families of these horrific crimes to get the closure they deserve.”

Nearly two months after Scott signed the bill, executions have not resumed in Florida. And it remains to be seen what all of this means for the nearly 400 people on Florida’s death row, the second-largest in the country, trailing only California’s. The key question is whether the Supreme Court’s ruling scuttles all of these existing death sentences – or if, as state officials maintain, it was not retroactive.

In an amicus brief filed Tuesday, a collection of high-profile legal figures and groups in Florida say the answer is clear to them. They argue in the 33-page brief submitted to the Florida Supreme Court that “a straightforward application” of the state’s sentencing statute means death-row inmates “are entitled to have their death sentences replaced by sentences of life without parole.”

According to their brief, state law requires a wholesale jettisoning of the death sentences, rather than “a piecemeal, case-by-case review.”

The statute they are citing states that if “the death penalty in a capital felony is held to be unconstitutional by the Florida Supreme Court or the United States Supreme Court . . . the court shall sentence such person to life imprisonment.”

State authorities, though, say that since the death penalty itself was not deemed unconstitutional, the statute does not apply here.

Instead, the Supreme Court “struck a portion of the [sentencing] statute as a means of imposing a constitutional sentence,” Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote in a court filing earlier this year. Bondi, R, argued that the state law did not intend to reduce all death sentences to life sentences “any time any aspect of the statute is held to be unconstitutional.”

Florida’s death penalty effectively ground to a halt after the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Hurst v. Florida case, which prompted lawmakers to revamp their sentencing statutes. The new law says that at least 10 jurors have to recommend a death sentence, and it scraps the old language saying that a judge could determine the sentence “notwithstanding the recommendation of a majority of the jury.”

(c) 2016, The Washington Post ยท Mark Berman

Facebook Comments