Florida’s sentencing process in death penalty cases violates the constitutional rights of criminal defendants, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday, siding with a death row inmate convicted in the 1998 murder of a fried-chicken restaurant manager.
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Sotomayor wrote that Hurst’s case was similar to the case of Timothy Ring, an Arizona man who the Supreme Court ruled was denied his Sixth Amendment right to a trial by jury when a judge ultimately weighed the aggravating and mitigating factors in his case before imposing a death sentence.
Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor delivered the majority opinion writing, “We hold this sentencing scheme unconstitutional”. The state supreme court had found Florida’s system met the Sixth Amendment standards because earlier U.S. Supreme Court decisions that found it acceptable hadn’t explicitly been overruled.
And it is clear lawmakers must make certain the jury – not the judge – should, as the ruling says, “make the critical findings necessary to impose the death penalty”.
The Supreme Court ruled in 2002 that a defendant has the right to have a jury decide whether the circumstances of a crime warrant a sentence of death. Florida state courts would need to decide if the now-void sentencing procedure was a “harmless error” that would not have had any bearing on Hurt’s death sentence, meaning that Hurt would have been sentenced to death regardless of exactly how it occurred.
Until the ruling Tuesday, Florida judges had ultimate discretion on whether to impose the death penalty or life imprisonment.
Support for the death penalty was widely criticized in 2015, a year in which the US saw fewer executions carried out than it had in years. As he has the past few years, he is sponsoring a bill to require a unanimous vote by the jury in the sentencing phase of capital murder cases. But Florida law did not require the jury to say how it voted on each factor.
Tuesday’s ruling leaves several questions to be answered in the coming months: Will inmates now on Death Row be entitled to new sentencing hearings? And it just might prompt Florida to drag itself into the modern world and abolish the death penalty. “No other state imitated the judicial veto that Florida’s scheme had protected”.
But Chief Assistant State Attorney Tom Bakkedahl said faced with the Supreme Court’s ruling he may ask Circuit Judge Dan Vaughn to delay the proceeding to give both sides more time to ponder an appropriate response to the 8-1 opinion.
More broadly, the decision could affect other Florida death sentences – at least those still on direct appeal – and potentially more, depending on whether the decision is given retroactive effect in Florida.
Butler said former Indian River County resident Rodney Lowe, who has twice been sentenced to death, has an appeal pending after a jury in 2012 returned him to death row for the murder of a Sebastian store clerk.
Florida carried out two executions, despite the pending supreme court ruling on Hurst’s case.
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In a dissent, Justice Samuel Alito wrote that, at the time of sentencing, judges perform “what amounts, in practical terms, to a reviewing function”.
