Florida Governor Pushes To Remove Safeguards in Death Penalty Cases

At the urg­ing of Governor Ron DeSantis, bills have been intro­duced in the Florida House and Senate that would allow death sen­tences even when the jury can­not come to a unan­i­mous ver­dict on the prop­er penal­ty. The pro­posed leg­is­la­tion would also per­mit a pre­sid­ing judge to over­ride a jury’s rec­om­men­da­tion of life and impose a death sen­tence. Death sen­tences would be allowed if at least eight jurors agreed, cre­at­ing the low­est thresh­old in the nation for the impo­si­tion of a death sen­tence. Only Alabama cur­rent­ly allows death sen­tences when the jury is not unan­i­mous, and it requires at least 10 jurors to agree on death.

The governor’s action came in the wake of a sen­tence of life with­out parole for Nikolas Cruz, the man con­vict­ed of the 2018 school shoot­ing at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in the Miami sub­urb of Parkland. Three jurors in Cruz’s case vot­ed for a life sen­tence, there­by rul­ing out the death penal­ty under existing law.

In an op-ed for City & State Florida, Melanie Kalmanson, a mem­ber of the Steering Committee for the American Bar Association’s Death Penalty Representation Project, and Maria DeLiberato, a cap­i­tal defense lawyer in Tampa and Executive Director of Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty (FADP), warned that the pro­posed leg­is­la­tion ​“would sig­nif­i­cant­ly reduce the pro­ce­dur­al safe­guards that ensure the con­sti­tu­tion­al­i­ty of death sen­tences imposed in Florida. …[T]his new pro­pos­al will make Florida an extreme out­lier, under­mines reli­a­bil­i­ty and con­fi­dence in the cap­i­tal sen­tenc­ing process, and threat­ens the final­i­ty of all death penal­ty cas­es, which ulti­mate­ly affects victims.” 

In Hurst v. Florida, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Florida’s ear­li­er sen­tenc­ing law, find­ing, ​“The Sixth Amendment requires a jury, not a judge, to find each fact nec­es­sary to impose a sen­tence of death. A jury’s mere rec­om­men­da­tion is not enough.” The Florida Supreme Court ini­tial­ly inter­pret­ed that rul­ing as requir­ing jury una­nim­i­ty in order to impose a death sen­tence, but in 2020, after sev­er­al changes to the com­po­si­tion of the court, it retract­ed its ear­li­er rul­ing and said una­nim­i­ty was only required in find­ing that an aggra­vat­ing factor exists.

Florida’s old­er death penal­ty laws led to more exon­er­a­tions from death row than any oth­er state in the mod­ern era. DPIC has been able to deter­mine the jury votes in 25 of the 26 death-row exon­er­a­tions involv­ing Florida’s ear­li­er statute that now may be par­tial­ly revived. In those 25 cas­es in which an inno­cent per­son could have been exe­cut­ed, juries shied away from unan­i­mous death rec­om­men­da­tions 23 times. Only two of the 25 cas­es had a unan­i­mous jury rec­om­men­da­tion for death.