The 4-1 ruling offered a clear picture of how much the
Supreme Court has changed since last January, when a conservative majority took
control after the retirements of longtime justices Barbara Pariente, R. Fred
Lewis and Peggy Quince.
Thursday’s majority opinion said the court “got it wrong” in
2016 when it required changes such as unanimous jury recommendations on death
sentences. The 2016 ruling came as judges, lawyers and state leaders tried to
move forward after the U.S. Supreme Court had found Florida’s death-penalty
system unconstitutional.
“Last, lest there be any doubt, we hold that our state
Constitution’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment … does not require a
unanimous jury recommendation — or any jury recommendation — before a death
sentence can be imposed,” said Thursday’s majority opinion shared by Chief
Justice Charles Canady and justices Ricky Polston, Alan Lawson and Carlos
Muniz. “The text of our Constitution requires us to construe the state cruel
and unusual punishment provision in conformity with decisions of the (U.S.)
Supreme Court interpreting the (U.S. Constitution’s) Eighth Amendment. Binding
Supreme Court precedent … holds that the Eighth Amendment does not require a
jury’s favorable recommendation before a death penalty can be imposed.”
But Justice Jorge Labarga wrote a highly critical dissent,
arguing that the majority “has taken a giant step backward and removed a
significant safeguard for the just application of the death penalty in
Florida.”
“Today, a majority of this court recedes from the
requirement that Florida juries unanimously recommend that a defendant be
sentenced to death,” Labarga wrote. “In doing so, the majority returns Florida
to its status as an absolute outlier among the jurisdictions in this country
that utilize the death penalty. The majority gives the green light to return to
a practice that is not only inconsistent with laws of all but one of the 29
states that retain the death penalty, but inconsistent with the law governing
the federal death penalty.”
The ruling came in a Polk County case in which Mark Anthony
Poole was convicted in the 2001 first-degree murder of Noah Scott, the
attempted murder and sexual battery of Loretta White, armed burglary and armed
robbery. After years of litigation, a jury in 2011 recommended by a vote of
11-1 that Poole should be sentenced to death — a sentence that a judge imposed.
But based on the Florida Supreme Court’s 2016 decision,
Poole’s death sentence was later vacated because of the lack of a unanimous
jury recommendation, Thursday’s opinion said. That spurred the state to appeal.
The Supreme Court on Thursday ordered that Poole’s death sentence be
reinstated.
The opinion came after a long, complicated series of issues
that stemmed from a January 2016 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court in a case
dubbed Hurst v. Florida. That ruling found the state’s death-penalty system was
unconstitutional because it gave too much authority to judges, instead of
juries, in imposing death sentences.
The Florida Supreme Court in October 2016, in the similarly
named case of Hurst v. State, interpreted and applied the U.S. Supreme Court
ruling. In addition to requiring unanimous jury recommendations, it also dealt
with a critical issue of jurors finding what are known as “aggravating factors”
that can justify death sentences.
The Florida court said that before judges could impose death
sentences, juries would have to unanimously find that aggravating factors were
proven beyond a reasonable doubt; unanimously find that aggravating factors are
sufficient to impose death; unanimously find that aggravating factors outweigh
“mitigating” factors; and unanimously recommend death sentences.
But in Thursday’s opinion, the majority said that
interpretation went too far. It said juries are required to unanimously find
the existence of one or more aggravating factors, but it backed away from the
other legal conclusions reached in October 2016.
“Without legal justification, this court used Hurst v.
Florida — a narrow and predictable (U.S. Supreme Court) ruling that should have
had limited practical effect on the administration of the death penalty in our
state as an occasion to disregard decades of settled (U.S.) Supreme Court and
Florida precedent,” the majority opinion said. “Under these circumstances, it
would be unreasonable for us not to recede from Hurst v. State’s erroneous
holdings.”
In 2017, the Legislature passed a law that required
unanimous jury recommendations as it complied with the state Supreme Court
ruling — a move that Thursday’s opinion acknowledged.
“Our decision today is not a comment on the merits of those
changes or on whether they should be retained,” the opinion said. “We simply
have restored discretion that Hurst v. State wrongly took from the political
branches.”
But in his dissent, Labarga wrote that there is “every reason
to maintain reasonable safeguards for ensuring that the death penalty is fairly
administered.”
“I strongly object to the characterization of this court’s
decision in Hurst v. State as one where this court ‘wrongly took (discretion)
from the political branches.’ As the court of last resort in Florida’s third
and co-equal branch of government —whose responsibility it is to interpret the
law — that is what this court did in Hurst v. State. The constitutionality of a
provision of Florida’s death penalty law is uniquely this court’s to
interpret,” Labarga wrote.
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