Second Florida Trial Court Strikes Down State’s Death Penalty Statute

A second Florida trial court has ruled that the state’s new death penalty statute is unconstitutional. On June 9, Hillsborough County Judge Samantha Ward barred prosecutors from seeking death against Michael Edward Keetley, saying that the state’s death penalty statute violated the Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Judge Ward said that the Florida legislature’s changes to the sentencing law after the U.S. Supreme Court had declared the old statute unconstitutional in Hurst v. Florida, created an additional set of constitutional problems. Hurst held that the Florida sentencing statute impermissibly permitted the judge, rather than the jury, to determine whether the prosecution had proven each fact necessary to impose the death penalty. In response to Hurst, the legislature passed a new law that permitted the court to impose a death sentence only if the jury unanimously found at least one aggravating circumstance that would make the defendant eligible for the death penalty and then recommended a death sentence by a vote of at least 10-2 after determining that the aggravating circumstance were sufficiently serious to justify a death sentence and outweighed any mitigating circumstances. Judge Ward said that, under the new sentencing scheme, the jury’s weighing of aggravating and mitigating circumstances constituted a fact-finding necessary before a death sentence could be imposed. She wrote, “it defies logic, and the dictates of [the Sixth Amendment], to have the jury find one of the prerequisites unanimously and beyond a reasonable doubt (that at least one aggravating factor exists), but not the other two prerequisites (that sufficient aggravators exist and that they outweigh the mitigating circumstances). Hurst specifically stated ‘[t]he Sixth Amendment requires a jury, not a judge, to find each fact necessary to impose a sentence of death.’” Judge Ward is the second Florida judge to find the new statute unconstitutional: one month earlier, on May 9, Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Milton Hirsch also struck down the law, ruling that the portion of the statute permitting the court to impose the death penalty without a unanimous jury vote for death violates the state constitution.

(State of Florida v. Michael Edward Keetley, Case No. 10-CF-018429, Thirteenth Judicial Circuit Court for Hillsborough County, Florida.) See Sentencing.