While it’s not exactly on life support, the death penalty has been scrutinized again–in the media and in the courts–with Florida, of course, in the cross hairs. It happens when a state’s death row has nearly 400 residents.
First, it was a Harvard University study that labeled Hillsborough and Pinellas counties as national “outliers” in their use of the death penalty. The two counties–along with Duval and Miami-Dade–comprise a quarter of the 16-county list. The criteria: five or more defendants receiving death sentences from 2010-15.
The report took State Attorney Mark Ober to task for being quick to pursue the death penalty even when there were significant mitigating factors, such as intellectual disability. Racial disparities were also noted. And more often than not, juries were not unanimous in their death-sentence recommendations.
Ober, not surprisingly, dismissed the report. “The group releasing the report opposes the death penalty, and its report is nothing more than a position paper to support its cause,” said Ober. “It makes no attempt to be fair and balanced.” Bill O’Reilly couldn’t have said it better.
Two days later the Florida Supreme Court tossed out the way death sentences are imposed throughout the state, in effect, forcing the Legislature to require a unanimous jury decision for the death penalty. Previously legislators had rewritten the majority law with a 10-2 death-vote requirement. That came in response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s finding that Florida’s simple-majority requirement would no longer stand.
Florida will now join the majority of states in requiring unanimous verdicts in death penalty cases.
What’s disturbing is that this is what it took to get this state to make the common-sense, manifestly fair move to unanimous verdicts.
It’s beyond daunting that fallible human beings, operating in an imperfect judicial system–from questionable witnesses to DNA evidence and periodic exonerations–can make the ultimate, irrevocable decision to put someone to death. That a 7-5 jury vote was sufficient was an abomination.
We’ll give the last word to Rep. Darryl Rouson, the St. Petersburg Democrat. “If it’s unanimous guilty,” noted Rouson, “then why not let it be unanimous death recommendation?”