Florida death-row prisoner Paul Durousseau was re-sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole December 10, 2021, when a second capital sentencing jury reached a non-unanimous sentencing verdict.
Durousseau was convicted and sentenced to death in 2007 on charges that he had raped and murdered a 24-year-old woman in Jacksonville in 1999. The trial court imposed the death penalty in that case after the jury split 10-2 in favor of death. At the time, Florida was one of three states that permitted judges to impose death sentences based upon non-unanimous jury recommendations for death.
The Florida Supreme Court overturned Durousseau’s death sentence in January 2017 following a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that the state’s sentencing procedures, which reserved for the trial judge the final finding of facts necessary to impose a death sentence, violated capital defendants’ rights to a jury trial. Citing the non-unanimous jury sentencing recommendation in that trial — also a 10-2 vote — the Florida court ruled that the constitutional violation in Durousseau’s case could not be considered harmless error.
In 2016, the Florida Supreme Court ruled that death sentences based on non-unanimous jury recommendations for death violated the state and federal constitutions. The Florida legislature then amended Florida’s death-sentencing law to require a unanimous jury recommendation for death before the trial court could impose the death penalty.
Also in 2016, the Delaware Supreme Court ruled that its capital-sentencing statute was unconstitutional because it permitted judges to impose the death penalty based upon non-unanimous sentencing recommendations by the jury. Only Alabama still permits judges to impose the death penalty based upon a non-unanimous jury recommendation for death.
Durousseau was charged with the murders of five other Jacksonville women, but never brought to trial in those cases.
Staff, After death sentence thrown out, convicted killer gets life in prison, News4Jax, December 10, 2021
