OUTLIER COUNTIES: Miami-Dade Death Sentences Reflect Constitutional Defects, Misconduct

Miami-Dade County has his­tor­i­cal­ly been a sig­nif­i­cant con­trib­u­tor to Florida​’s death row and large pro­por­tions of its recent death sen­tences raise seri­ous con­sti­tu­tion­al ques­tions about the prac­tices that result in death ver­dicts and the char­ac­ter­is­tics of the defen­dants who are sen­tenced to death. Miami-Dade imposed five death sen­tences between 2010 and 2015, plac­ing it among the 16 coun­ties that pro­duced more death sen­tences than 99.5% of all U.S. counties. 

The ques­tion­able reli­a­bil­i­ty of the Miami-Dade death penal­ty cas­es is illus­trat­ed by the char­ac­ter­is­tics of the sev­en cas­es that came before the Florida Supreme Court on direct appeal from 2006 – 2015. Six of those cas­es (86%) involved a non-unan­i­mous jury rec­om­men­da­tion for death, a prac­tice the Florida Supreme Court struck down as uncon­sti­tu­tion­al in October 2016. Miami-Dade had the sec­ond high­est rate of pros­e­cu­to­r­i­al mis­con­duct among the 16 most pro­lif­ic death-sen­tenc­ing coun­ties and near­ly a third (29%) of the cas­es decid­ed on direct appeal since 2006 involved mis­con­duct. In revers­ing one of the cas­es for mis­con­duct, the court said the pros­e­cu­tor ​“appeared to be com­mit­ted to win­ning a death rec­om­men­da­tion rather than sim­ply seek­ing jus­tice.” In anoth­er, the court over­turned the death sen­tence as a result of the pros­e­cu­tor’s ​“inflam­ma­to­ry, egre­gious, and legal­ly improp­er closing argument.” 

One for­mer Assistant State Attorney, who was cred­it­ed with send­ing more peo­ple to death row than any oth­er Florida pros­e­cu­tor, spoke dis­parag­ing­ly of the role of mit­i­gat­ing evi­dence in cap­i­tal cas­es, say­ing, ​“Of course I feel bad that soci­ety has cre­at­ed a mon­ster, but should the bad back­ground in the past dis­able us from impos­ing an appro­pri­ate pun­ish­ment now?” And the defen­dants judges sen­tenced to death in four of the cas­es had pre­sent­ed sig­nif­i­cant mit­i­gat­ing evi­dence that made them near­ly indis­tin­guish­able from those who are exempt from cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment as a result of their age or men­tal health status. 

Yet such a full pre­sen­ta­tion of mit­i­gat­ing evi­dence was atyp­i­cal in the cas­es that result­ed in death ver­dicts. The lawyers in those cas­es pre­sent­ed an aver­age of one day of mit­i­gat­ing evi­dence. The new death sen­tences also reflect the role of race. All five of the defen­dants sen­tenced to death in Miami-Dade from 2010 – 2015 were Black or Latino, and a study of sen­tenc­ing rates in Florida found that defen­dants are 6.5 times more like­ly to be exe­cut­ed if the vic­tim is a White female than if the vic­tim is a Black male.