Florida Supreme Court Strikes Down State’s Capital Sentencing Statute, Requires Jury Unanimity Before Imposing Death

The Florida Supreme Court has declared uncon­sti­tu­tion­al the state’s prac­tice of per­mit­ting judges to impose death sen­tences based upon a non-unan­i­mous jury rec­om­men­da­tion for death. In two rul­ings issued October 14 the court held that juries must unan­i­mous­ly find all facts nec­es­sary to impose a death sen­tence, includ­ing the exis­tence of any aggra­vat­ing fac­tor relied upon as a rea­son to impose the death penal­ty, whether the aggra­vat­ing fac­tors in and of them­selves pro­vide suf­fi­cient grounds for impos­ing the death penal­ty, and whether the aggra­vat­ing fac­tors out­weigh the mit­i­gat­ing cir­cum­stances (rea­sons for life) pre­sent­ed by the defense. 

In the first case, Timothy Lee Hurst v. State of Florida, the court vacat­ed Hurst’s death sen­tence imposed and remand­ed his case for a new sen­tenc­ing hear­ing. The sec­ond deci­sion, Larry Darnell Perry v. State of Florida, struck down the Florida leg­is­la­ture’s March 2016 revi­sion of the state’s cap­i­tal sen­tenc­ing statute because it does not require a unan­i­mous jury rec­om­men­da­tion of death before the tri­al judge can con­sid­er impos­ing a death sentence. 

Hurst is the same defen­dant whose appeal reached the U.S. Supreme Court ear­li­er this year, result­ing in an 8 – 1 deci­sion declar­ing that the state’s pri­or cap­i­tal sen­tenc­ing statute vio­lat­ed the 6^th Amendment right to a jury tri­al by reserv­ing for the judge, rather than the jury, the ulti­mate pow­er to find the facts that could lead to a death sen­tence. The Court specif­i­cal­ly held that the statute imper­mis­si­bly denied Hurst a jury find­ing of aggra­vat­ing cir­cum­stances that could make him eli­gi­ble for the death penal­ty. In response to the Court’s deci­sion, the Florida leg­is­la­ture amend­ed the statute to require juries to unan­i­mous­ly find at least one aggra­vat­ing cir­cum­stance, but allowed the jury to rec­om­mend a death sen­tence if at least 10 of 12 jurors agreed. The state court’s deci­sion in Hurst made clear that the statute vio­lat­ed Florida state con­sti­tu­tion­al pro­vi­sions requir­ing unan­i­mous jury ver­dicts, as well as fed­er­al constitutional law. 

In Perry, the court struck down the amend­ed death penal­ty law, say­ing the statute ​“can­not be applied con­sti­tu­tion­al­ly to pend­ing pros­e­cu­tions because the Act does not require una­nim­i­ty in the jury’s final rec­om­men­da­tion as to whether the defen­dant should be sen­tenced to death.” While the deci­sion in Hurst says that defen­dants sen­tenced to death under the uncon­sti­tu­tion­al sen­tenc­ing pro­ce­dures are not enti­tled to have their sen­tences auto­mat­i­cal­ly reduced to life in prison, it leaves unclear exact­ly what will hap­pen in the cas­es of the approx­i­mate­ly 400 peo­ple on the state’s death row.

The Delaware Supreme Court recent­ly struck down that state’s death penal­ty statute on sim­i­lar grounds, leav­ing Florida and Alabama as the only two states that allowed judges to impose death sen­tences after non-unan­i­mous jury rec­om­men­da­tions. Professor Mary Anne Franks of the University of Miami School of Law said, ​“The Florida Supreme Court’s rul­ing that jury rec­om­men­da­tions for the death penal­ty must be unan­i­mous is a long over­due recog­ni­tion of the state’s fatal­ly flawed cap­i­tal punishment regime.”