Juries in two Broward County, Florida death-penal­ty tri­als have hand­ed down life sen­tences for four cap­i­tal defen­dants in the span of one week, high­light­ing the effect of a new Florida law requir­ing the unan­i­mous agree­ment of the jury before a defen­dant can be sen­tenced to death. On July 16, a Broward County jury spared three defen­dants—Eloyn Ingraham, Bernard Forbes, and Andre Delancy—whom it had con­vict­ed in March of mur­der­ing a Broward sher­if­f’s deputy. Three days lat­er, anoth­er Broward jury reject­ed the death penal­ty for Eric Montgomery, after hav­ing con­vict­ed him in April of the mur­ders of his wife and step­daugh­ter. The ver­dicts marked the third time in four cap­i­tal tri­als since Florida adopt­ed the jury una­nim­i­ty require­ment that Broward juries have opt­ed for life sen­tences. The sole excep­tion was the case of Peter Avsenew, who rep­re­sent­ed him­self in the penal­ty-phase after fir­ing his lawyers, pre­sent­ed no penal­ty-phase defense, and told the jury he had ​“no regrets” for his actions and was ​“proud of the deci­sions [he’d] made.” South Florida juries in Palm Beach County also have rec­om­mend­ed life sen­tences in the three first-degree mur­der tri­als con­duct­ed there since September 2017. In March 2017, the Florida leg­is­la­ture changed its death penal­ty law in response to two Florida Supreme Court deci­sions in October 2016 that declared the state’s prac­tice of per­mit­ting judges to impose death sen­tences based upon a non-unan­i­mous jury rec­om­men­da­tions for death to be uncon­sti­tu­tion­al. Those deci­sions were based on the U.S. Supreme Court’s January 2016 deci­sion in Hurst v. Florida, which ruled that Florida’s pre­vi­ous death-penal­ty statute vio­lat­ed the Sixth Amendment right to a jury tri­al by giv­ing judges, rather than the jury, the ulti­mate pow­er to find the facts that could lead to a death sen­tence. Florida’s crim­i­nal law required una­nim­i­ty for every oth­er deci­sion made by a jury, and the 2017 amend­ment brought Florida’s law into line with the laws of vir­tu­al­ly every oth­er death-penal­ty state. Only Alabama still per­mits a tri­al judge to impose the death penal­ty based upon a jury’s non-unan­i­mous sentencing recommendation. 

Before the 2016 court rul­ings, three-quar­ters of Florida’s 390-per­son death row had been sen­tenced to death after jurors had split on whether to rec­om­mend death. In 2017, just three death sen­tences were imposed statewide, down from nine in 2015. (Capital tri­als were on hold for most of 2016.) As a result of the state’s for­mer non-una­nim­i­ty rule, Broward and eleven oth­er Florida coun­ties were among the 2% of U.S. coun­ties respon­si­ble for a major­i­ty of pris­on­ers on death row across the coun­try as of January 1, 2013. 90% of Florida’s death-row exon­er­a­tions have come in cas­es in which juries did not reach a unan­i­mous rec­om­men­da­tion for death.

(Rafael Olmeda, Broward jury choos­es life for con­vict­ed killer, South Florida Sun Sentinel, July 19, 2018; Rafael Olmeda, Jury rejects death penal­ty for men who killed Broward deputy, South Florida Sun Sentinel, July 16, 2018; Rafael Olmeda and Marc Freeman, South Florida killers avoid­ing death row under new law, South Florida Sun Sentinel, July 20, 2018.) See Sentencing and U.S. Supreme Court.

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