Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi is unwilling to accept the Florida Supreme Court's ruling that the state's death penalty statute is unconstitutional. The court's October ruling that only a unanimous jury may sentence a defendant to death was one of the most important death penalty cases in years. The ruling essentially ended the death penalty in the state ranked fourth in total executions. Now Bondi is taking things a step further by appealing to the U.S. Supreme Court.
From the Miami Herald:
The state plans to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to revisit a landmark case in which justices struck down as unconstitutional Florida’s death-penalty sentencing procedure because it gave too much power to judges, instead of juries. […]
The state is objecting to the Florida court’s interpretation of the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision in January in [Hurst v. Florida], according to the document filed Friday in Escambia County.
Before Hurst v. Florida, the Florida death penalty statute required only that a simple majority of the jury recommend the death penalty. A judge then weighed the aggravating factors against the mitigating ones and either affirmed or override the recommendation.
In Hurst, SCOTUS found that the statute was unconstitutional and in violation of the Sixth Amendment right to trial by jury because it gave fact finding power to the judge. From the Herald:
Florida lawmakers hurriedly rewrote the law this spring, requiring jurors to unanimously find that at least one aggravating factor exists before a defendant can be eligible for a death sentence and requiring at least 10 jurors to recommend death for the sentence to be imposed.
The new law, approved by Gov. Rick Scott, also required juries to weigh whether sufficient mitigating factors exist to outweigh the aggravating circumstances, but the law is silent about whether those decisions must be unanimous.
In October, however, the state Supreme Court also found this law unconstitutional because it doesn't require unanimity.
The Florida court, in a 5-2 ruling, decided that the lack of unanimity in the state law runs afoul of protections guaranteed by the U.S. and state constitutions.
The majority also found that the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Hurst mandated that all findings necessary for imposition of a death sentence are “elements” that must be decided by a jury, and Florida “has a longstanding history of requiring unanimous jury verdicts as the elements of a crime,” the majority wrote.
Unanimity wasn't addressed in the Hurst decision, and Bondi's office doesn't think it’s constitutionally required.
The Florida court interpreted the U.S. court’s earlier ruling in Hurst “to require jury findings of all aggravating circumstances; mitigating circumstances; and weighing rather than only requiring jury findings of one aggravating circumstance,” Senior Assistant Attorney General Charmaine Millsaps and Assistant Attorney General John Molchan wrote in the six-page request in Escambia County.
“The state of Florida believes this expansive reading to be in error and will seek discretionary review in the United States Supreme Court,” the lawyers wrote.
Whether or not the Supreme Court will take the case is yet to be seen, but there's a strong possibility that it is actually out of the court's purview.
“[The state is] unhappy with the result, and they’re unhappy with all of these death sentences being reversed. But they’re running into a problem: what’s the federal issue and what’s the state issue. The U.S. Supreme Court doesn’t have jurisdiction to decide what the state statute meant. That’s a question of state law,” [said] lawyer Martin McClain.
Florida has repeatedly tried to expand the various ways that the death penalty can be implemented, including packing the bench with pro-death penalty judges, giving those judges the ability to override the jury, and allowing non-unanimous juries to impose capital punishment. This year, the Florida and the U.S. Supreme Court have halted the state's legislative attempts to infringe on defendant's rights. Let's hope they continue to do so.