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| The American Bar Association is asking the US Supreme Court to look into how the death penalty is used in Florida. Image: Shutterstock |
The death
penalty will likely always be a source of legal, not to mention moral,
contention, but this is particularly true right now in Florida, where the
American Bar Association recently filed a brief asking the US Supreme Court to
overturn part of the state’s death penalty law.
The ABA notes that Florida is the only state that does not require a
unanimous jury vote to invoke the death penalty, which could potentially be a
violation of the Sixth Amendment, granting the right to trial by jury, and the
Eighth Amendment, which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment.
“We have a love-hate relationship with the death penalty,”
notes Florida attorney Kendall Coffey. “We see these despicable crimes; we want the
maximum punishment applied to people who brutally kill children or to
terrorists. At the same time we’re very concerned about mistakes being made,
both mistakes with respect to selecting who is worthy of dying, if anyone, and
mistakes with respect to the actual administration of execution. And these kind
of cases, where horrible pains and horrible mistreatment occurs in the course
of an execution, are very troubling to Americans and obviously of great concern
to the United States Supreme Court.”
The ABA’s appeal comes in large part as a reaction to the case of
Timothy Lee Hurst, sentenced to death for the 1998 murder of an assistant
manager at the fast food restaurant where both worked. His lawyer argued earlier this year that
Florida’s death penalty law violates Hurst’s rights because the sentencing was
given by a majority of the jury, not unanimously.
Current Florida law states that a jury can recommend the death penalty
as its final sentence even without a majority.
The judge must make the ultimate decision, however.
“Unique among all capital punishment jurisdictions in the United States,
Florida is the only jurisdiction that allows a jury to determine by majority
vote both whether aggravating circumstances have been proved beyond a
reasonable doubt and to recommend a sentence
of death,” says the ABA’s
argument summary. “Further,
Florida does not require that the majority agree on which aggravating factor exists….And the majority does not report
which aggravator(s) it finds to the judge, but reports only its
recommendation.”
Florida is the number two state, behind Texas, for using the death
sentence. Of those currently on death
row, half were sent there by split jury decisions.
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