The Florida Supreme Court has over­turned the death sen­tence imposed on Eric Kurt Patrick (pic­tured) and ordered the low­er court to con­duct a hear­ing on the fail­ure of Patrick’s lawyer to ade­quate­ly ques­tion a juror who admit­ted his belief that gay peo­ple are ​“moral­ly depraved” might affect his judg­ment of guilt or inno­cence. Patrick was con­vict­ed of the 2005 mur­der of Steven Schumacher, a gay man who had brought Patrick home after meet­ing him in a park, and was sen­tenced to death after a bare 7 – 5 major­i­ty of jurors vot­ed to rec­om­mend the death penal­ty. The court on June 14, 2018, reversed Patrick’s death sen­tence based upon its 2016 deci­sion in Hurst v. State, which declared that death sen­tences based upon a non-unan­i­mous jury rec­om­men­da­tion for death vio­lat­ed the state and fed­er­al con­sti­tu­tions. The appeals court direct­ed the tri­al court to con­duct an evi­den­tiary hear­ing to deter­mine whether Patrick’s lawyer’s han­dling of jury selec­tion was inef­fec­tive. During jury selec­tion, one juror admit­ted he ​“would have a bias if [he] knew the per­pe­tra­tor was homo­sex­u­al.” When asked about his abil­i­ty to eval­u­ate guilt based only the evi­dence proven beyond a rea­son­able doubt, he said, ​“Put it this way, if I felt the per­son was a homo­sex­u­al, I per­son­al­ly believe that per­son is moral­ly depraved enough that he might lie, might steal, might kill.” The juror then answered ​“yes” when asked if this bias might affect his delib­er­a­tions. Patrick, who does not iden­ti­fy as gay, was home­less and acknowl­edged that he had engaged in sex­u­al activ­i­ty with oth­er men to sup­port him­self. On the night of the mur­der, the men were in bed togeth­er after Patrick had giv­en Schumacher a mas­sage, when Schumacher attempt­ed to ini­ti­ate anal sex and Patrick ​“cut loose on” the vic­tim, beat­ing him to death. Patrick’s appeal lawyers argued that defense coun­sel should have struck the juror because of his clear bias; pros­e­cu­tors argued that Schumacher, not Patrick, was gay and that Patrick’s tri­al lawyer accept­ed the juror for strate­gic rea­sons. The court wrote that “[a]pplying this evi­dence to the juror’s voir dire answers estab­lish­es that, by the juror’s own acknowl­edge­ment on the record, he was pre­dis­posed to believe that Patrick is moral­ly depraved enough to have com­mit­ted the charged offens­es. Although Patrick does not iden­ti­fy as homo­sex­u­al and indi­cat­ed in his con­fes­sion that his sex­u­al activ­i­ty with men was for mate­r­i­al sup­port rather than per­son­al ful­fill­ment,” the opin­ion said, ​“these points do not elim­i­nate the bias that this juror said he would feel based on the evi­dence that tri­al coun­sel and the tri­al court knew the jury would hear dur­ing tri­al.” However, the court said it did not have enough evi­dence to decide the issue. Remanding the case for an evi­den­tiary hear­ing, it wrote, “[o]n this record, we can nei­ther ignore the pos­si­bil­i­ty that counsel’s fail­ure to chal­lenge this juror was strate­gic nor con­clude that it was.” 

(Jim Saunders, Supreme Court tar­gets juror anti-gay views in death case, News Service of Florida, June 14, 2018; Florida: Death row inmate wins hear­ing due to juror com­ments, The Associated Press, June 14, 2018.) Read the Florida Supreme Court’s deci­sion here. See Arbitrariness and Florida.

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