Florida asks court to deny inmate’s execution-delay request

The Florida Supreme Court on Wednesday ordered state officials there to address questions by Friday about the effect of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision striking down the state’s death sentencing law on a man due to be executed in less than a month.

“This may very, very well stop executions in Florida for quite a time while all of these cases might be pending”, said former Florida Supreme Court Justice Gerald Kogan, a death penalty opponent and one of three former justices who filed briefs supporting Hurst’s challenge.

In an 8-1 ruling, with only Justice Samuel Alito dissenting, SCOTUS determined that the sentencing procedure is flawed because juries don’t make a final decision but instead only play an advisory role while the judge can reach a different decision, according to the Associated Press. Hurst’s case was returned to the Florida Supreme Court to decide whether his sentence would be affected by the ruling.

The next execution is scheduled on 11 February so “we’ll find out what happens pretty quickly”, he added.

On Tuesday, the high court struck down as unconstitutional a controversial part of Florida law, saying it did not give juries an adequate voice in deciding whether defendants are sentenced to die. “The impact of the court’s ruling on existing death sentences will need to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis”, she said.

Michael Radelet, an expert on the Florida death penalty, said the bottom line after Tuesday’s ruling is uncertainty. 2015 hit a 24-year low for executions and death penalty sentences in the United States, along with several states doing away with the practices altogether, including the rather conservative Nebraska. Because of the special power Florida judges have in sentencing trials, however, there arises the possibility he or she may be weighing those factors differently than a jury might.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that a jury’s “mere recommendation is not enough”.

In the case reviewed by the high court, a jury voted 7-5 to recommend a death sentence for Timothy Hurst in the 1998 murder of a fried-chicken restaurant manager, without specifying what aggravating factors applied. “No other state imitated the judicial veto that Florida’s scheme had protected”. As NPR notes, retroactivity is also a matter of state law and the Florida Supreme Court uses a more generous application of retroactivity than most states. Now the Florida Supreme Court said it will consider arguments for how the new ruling affects his case.

More broadly, the court said, following its own precedent, any fact exposing “the defendant to a greater punishment than authorized by the jury’s guilty verdict… must be submitted to a jury”. The judge then independently makes his or her own decision on whether the inmate receives the death penalty, potentially disregarding the jury’s sentencing decision.

Advocacy groups claim that one in four death-row convicts in Florida are later exonerated.

The ruling may affect the death penalties of Troy Victorino and Jerone Hunter, who were parties in the slayings of six people in a Deltona, Florida, home on August 6, 2004.