Florida Supreme Court rules state death penalty unconstitutional

A death penalty protester in Washington, D.C.

(Image credit: Mandel Ngan/Getty Images)

published 15 October 2016

The Florida Supreme Court ruled Friday the state's death penalty law is unconstitutional because it does not require a unanimous jury decision to impose the sentence. As currently written, the law only requires 10 of 12 votes to approve the death penalty.

The version of the law this decision overturns was itself the result of a federal Supreme Court case in January, when SCOTUS struck down a previous iteration that allowed judges to override jury decisions in capital cases. The jury could previously only recommend death or life in prison, leaving the final choice to the judge.

Now, until the state legislature approves a new death penalty law that can pass muster at court, Florida's 385 current death row prisoners are in something of a legal limbo. Some inmates will receive a new sentencing hearing, and others may be able to escape their current sentence "unless the state can prove its heavy burden of showing beyond a reasonable doubt that the error in their cases would not have affected the jury verdicts in capital sentencing," said Howard Simon of the Florida American Civil Liberties Union.

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.

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