Mr Dunham added: “Florida’s death sentencing scheme has various problems”.
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“The Sixth Amendment requires a jury, not a judge, to find each fact necessary to impose a sentence of death”, Sotomayor wrote. The court sentenced Hurst to death, but he was granted a new sentencing hearing on appeal. “A jury’s mere recommendation is not enough”, Sotomayor wrote.
The Court said conclusion reached in the Spaziano case and Hildwin case was wrong, and irreconcilable with its earlier ruling in Apprendi v. New Jersey. The judge can also weigh other factors independently. So a jury could base its decision on one particular aggravating factor, but a judge could then rely on a different factor the jury never considered. The justices had just ruled on a narrow case involving lethal injection protocols, but had found themselves increasingly pressed to address the moral issues being raised out of legal challenges, appeals and exonerations that were becoming impossible to ignore.
Justice Alito dissented with the majority judgment and said ‘it defies belief to suggest that the jury would not have found the existence of either aggravating factor if its finding was binding.
Sotomayor said in the majority opinion that the high court would leave it to the state courts in Florida to decide whether the error was harmless. But it is unclear whether all seven agreed on both, or, for example, whether four agreed on one and three on the other.
They blame the Florida’s system for letting a judge dictate the final facts for a death row decision.
The United States Supreme Court made a decision Tuesday that will change the State of Florida’s process for sentencing a person to the death penalty.
The US Supreme Court [official website] ruled [opinion, PDF] 8-1 Monday in Hurst v. Florida [docket] that Florida’s capital sentencing scheme violates the Sixth Amendment.
The decision striking down the state’s death-penalty sentencing structure comes almost three years after Scott signed into law a bill, sponsored by Negron and Rep. Matt Gaetz, aimed at reducing delays in death penalty cases.
Hurst is the latest in a series of Supreme Court cases over the past several years that have nibbled around the edges of capital sentencing in the US, taking on lethal injection drugs, jury selection, execution of the mentally handicapped and of convicts for crimes committed as juveniles, and jury instructions.
Florida has already carried out its first execution of 2016. “I don’t know what that will do with people who are on death row”. Tuesday’s ruling said Florida’s system was similarly flawed.
Alabama death penalty cases feature a two-part process, the guilt phase and, if the defendant is convicted, a penalty phase.
Governor Rick Scott, Attorney General Pam Bondi and lawmakers are now working to figure out what the high court’s ruling means for the state, and if taxpayers will be on the hook to re-try death row convicts. But the Florida Supreme Court’s previous rulings on retroactive application are much broader than its national counterpart.
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Under Florida’s system, the jury makes a recommendation to a judge on whether to impose the death sentence.
