Why Florida will have to rethink its approach to executions

By S.M. | NEW YORK

LAST year, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a 31-page dissent to a 5-to-4 decision upholding Oklahoma’s controversial method of executing criminals. To rely on a drug cocktail with a track record of torturing prisoners to death, she wrote in Glossip v Gross, is “barbarous” and violates the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishments. This week, Justice Sotomayor wrote her first majority opinion in a death-penalty case, taking just ten pages to explain why Florida’s death-sentencing procedures are out of whack with the jury-trial guarantee in the Sixth Amendment. The vote was 8-to-1, with only Justice Samuel Alito in dissent.

In nearly every state that executes criminals, the decision to sentence a convicted murderer to death lies with the jury. But in Florida, a hybrid sentencing scheme has given judges the final word. While juries are asked to issue an “advisory sentence” by a majority vote, and their recommendations must be given “great weight”, presiding judges are empowered to adjust the sentence based on their own assessments of the “aggravating and mitigating factors”. In Hurst v Florida, Timothy Hurst, a man found guilty of stabbing a woman to death in 1998, protested the circumstances that led to his death sentence. In a 2012 hearing, the jury voted 7-5 to recommend capital punishment, and the judge, relying on this suggestion as well as her personal determination that the crime happened in the course of a robbery and was “heinous, atrocious, or cruel”, agreed. She sentenced Mr Hurst to die.

“The Sixth Amendment requires a jury, not a judge, to find each fact necessary to impose a sentence of death,” Justice Sotomayor wrote in this week's ruling, extending the logic of Ring v Arizona, a 2002 decision striking down Arizona’s capital-sentencing scheme. “A jury’s mere recommendation is not enough”. So even though the judge and jury seemed to reach the same conclusion in Mr Hurst’s case, the ultimate determination to send Mr Hurst to death row violated the constitution because it turned on findings of fact by the judge. For Marcos Jiménez, a former US attorney for Florida’s southern district, Tuesday's ruling is overdue. “Florida’s system is arbitrary and capricious, as it allows death based on a jury’s mish-mash combination of minority votes on aggravating factors”, he says. This is “an unreliable system that does not require even a majority finding as to any particular factor”.

Besides cancelling Mr Hurst’s execution date, the Supreme Court’s decision requires Florida to rethink its approach to capital sentencing and to revamp its laws accordingly. It also calls into question the validity of other Sunshine state death sentences, though it will not automatically commute the sentences of Florida’s 390 death-row inmates, all but five of whom are men. Convicts awaiting capital punishment whose sentences were imposed without a jury’s unanimous vote on aggravating circumstances presumably have some hope of a new sentencing trial. Death-row inmates in Alabama and Delaware, the only other states that have not required jury sentences, may likewise see some promise in Hurst. But Justice Sotomayor’s opinion offered little in the way of guidance on the ruling’s full implications. “[T]he case is remanded for further proceedings not inconsistent with this opinion”, she wrote.