By: Abigail Young
One might expect that the state with the most death row exonerations[1] would be embarrassed to have facilitated such grave injustices. Not the Florida Supreme Court.
In 2020, the newly comprised Florida Supreme Court held in State v. Poole that a death sentence no longer requires a unanimous jury recommendation, instead the jury only must unanimously agree on one aggravating factor.[2]This was a reversal of the Florida Supreme Court’s own decision four years earlier in Hurst v. State.[3] On remand from the U.S. Supreme Court, the Florida Supreme Court held in Hurst v. State that a jury must unanimously find the existence of statutory aggravating factors beyond a reasonable doubt and unanimously recommend the death penalty.[4]
In 2016, in Hurst v. Florida, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the Florida Supreme Court’s upholding of the death sentence where the jury voted 7-5 on retrial to recommend a death sentence that the judge imposed.[5] The Supreme Court deemed Florida’s capital sentencing scheme unconstitutional because “[t]he Sixth Amendment requires a jury, not a judge, to find each fact necessary to impose a sentence of death. A jury’s mere recommendation is not enough.” [6] In holding Florida’s capital sentencing scheme unconstitutional the U.S. Supreme Court rejected all the State’s arguments in favor of upholding Hurst’s death sentence emphasizing, “[n]one hold water.”[7] However, it is these very arguments that the Florida Supreme Court endorsed in Poole.
The Florida Supreme Court in Poole held that the jury need only find one aggravating circumstance beyond a reasonable doubt and that afterward, the judge may sentence the defendant to death.[8] However, the U.S. Supreme Court previously rejected this argument in Hurst v. Florida when they held that the defendant was not death-eligible unless the jury found the defendant should be sentenced to death. Secondly, the Florida Supreme Court argued that they can overrule their previous ruling in Hurst v. State despite stare decisis because “stare decisis has consequence only to the extent it sustains incorrect decisions; correct judgments have no need for that principle to prop them up.”[9] This is a circular argument. The U.S. Supreme Court held in Hurst v. Florida that stare decisis may be overruled when “necessary and proper” where “subsequent developments in constitutional law erode reasoning of prior cases.”[10] Neither exception is present here. It is not necessary that a judge be able to impose the death penalty after the jury finds one aggravating factor nor has later constitutional law eroded the reasoning of Hurst v. State and the cases on which it relies. In fact, Poolemakes Florida an outlier inconsistent with the federal death penalty in every other state but one.[11] As Justice Labarga highlights in his Poole dissent “[t]he majority gives the green light to return to a practice that is not only inconsistent with laws of all but one of the twenty-nine states that retain the death penalty but inconsistent with the law governing the federal death penalty.”[12] Poole contradicts Hurst v. Florida as the U.S. Supreme Court previously rejected its central reasoning.
Poole also conflicts with the precedent the U.S. Supreme Court in Hurst v. Florida relied upon, Apprendi[13] and Ring.[14] In Apprendi, the U.S. Supreme Court held “that any fact that exposes the defendant to a greater punishment than that authorized by the jury’s guilty verdict is an element that must be submitted to the jury.”[15] The U.S. Supreme Court in Ring held that a capital defendant is entitled to a jury determination of any fact on which the legislature conditions an increase in the maximum punishment.[16] Meanwhile, the Florida Supreme Court in Poole held that the jury only needs to determine the existence of one aggravating factor and on that basis alone the judge may inflict the penalty of death. This, however, exposes the capital defendant to a greater punishment without the jury, contrary to both Ring and Apprendi. A judge sentencing a defendant to death instead of life, based on one aggravating factor, without the jury, is what the U.S. Supreme Court in Hurst v. Florida deemed a Sixth Amendment violation.
Poole broadens the number of capital defendants that are subject to the death sentence as it no longer requires a jury’s unanimous recommendation. The effects of the Florida Supreme Court’s decision in Poole are impossible to overexaggerate. After Poole, around 190 people on death row who would have been entitled to relief under Hurst are no longer eligible.[17] To examine what led the Florida Supreme Court to reverse its own decision in Hurst, one must look at politics. By the time the Florida Supreme Court decided Poole, three justices who made up the majority in Hurst were forced to resign due to the state’s mandatory retirement age.[18] Governor DeSantis then appointed three new conservative justices to the Court, two of whom were then appointed to the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, leaving a five-member Court to preside over Poole. The dissenters in Hurst v. State joined the newly appointed member, Justice Muñiz, to form Poole’s majority opinion. Ironically, pro-life organizations celebrated Justice Muñiz’s appointment.[19]Justice Canady’s dissent in Hurst v. State that “once the jury has found the element of an aggravator, no additional ‘facts’ need be proved” for a death sentence became the majority holding in Poole.[20]
The decision in Poole “removed a significant safeguard for the just application of the death penalty in Florida.”[21] Studies indicate that juries tend to do a more thorough review of all evidence when responsible for making a unanimous recommendation of death as required by Hurst v. State.[22] By removing this requirement, the Florida Supreme Court, Justices Canady, Polston, Lawson, and Muñiz, have condoned an increase in modern-day lynchings. The removal of the narrowing requirements mandating that the jury recommend death as required by the Eighth Amendment is cruel, especially when Florida holds the national title as the state with the most death row exonerations. This accounts for approximately one in every three prisoners executed by the state in the modern era death penalty.[23]
The death penalty is a direct descendent of lynching.[24] States with the highest lynching rates now have the highest execution rates, and Florida is no exception. According to the Equal Justice Initiative report, Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror, Floridians lynched at a higher rate than any other state, per capita.[25]These lynchings only began to decrease once court-sanctioned capital punishment increased.[26] Now, Florida is the fourth highest executioner[27] and has the second-highest death row population.[28] By removing vital safeguards, Poolewill result in a greater number of executions. The Florida Supreme Court is directly responsible for the continuation of the state’s high lynching rates, now sanctioned as the death penalty.
[1]Death Penalty Information Center, State and Federal Info, Florida; https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/state-and-federal-info/state-by-state/florida.
[2] See State v. Poole, 297 So. 3d, 487, 495 (Fla. 2020).
[3] See Hurst v. State, 202 So. 3d 40, 44 (Fla. 2016).
[4] “[T]he jury must also unanimously find that the aggravating factors are sufficient for the imposition of death and unanimously find that the aggravating factors outweigh the mitigation before a sentence of death may be considered by the judge.” See Hurst, 202 So. 3d at 54.
[5] Hurst v. Florida, 136 U.S. 92, 103 (2016), rev’d Hurst v. State, 147 So. 3d 435, 440 (Fla. 2014).
[6] Hurst v. Florida, 136 U.S. 92, 94 (2016).
[7] Hurst, 577 U.S. at 99.
[8] See State v. Poole, 297 So. 3d, 487, 508 (Fla. 2020).
[9] Id. at 507.
[10] Hurst, 577 U.S. at 102.
[11] Florida’s Supreme Court Decision in State v. Poole at Odds with Most States That Still Allow the Death Penalty, Southern Poverty Law Center, Jan. 23, 2020 https://www.splcenter.org/presscenter/floridas-supreme-court-decision-state-v-poole-odds-most-states-still-allow-death-penalty.
[12] Poole, 297 So. 3d at 513.
[13] Holding that the Sixth Amendment does not permit a defendant in a noncapital case, without additional jury findings, to be exposed to a penalty exceeding the maximum he would receive if the punishment was based only on the facts reflected in the jury’s guilty verdict. Apprendi v. New Jersey,120 U.S. 466, 497 (2000).
[14] Holding that capital defendants are entitled to a jury determination of any fact on which the legislature conditions an increase in their punishment. Ring v. Arizona, 584 U.S. 584, 589 (2002).
[15] Apprendi, 120 U.S. at 97.
[16] See Hurst, 577 U.S. at 97.
[17] “The mid-course reversal of the Hurst precedent has created several arbitrary distinctions between which prisoners can obtain relief from non-unanimous death sentences and which cannot . . . [w]here any particular prisoner falls within these categories is largely a matter of chance” Florida Supreme Court “Recedes” from Major Death Penalty Decision Creating Uncertainty about Status of Dozen of Cases, ABA, (March 10, 2020).
[18] Id.
[19] Jin Yoo, Pro-life Groups Support Trump Supreme Court Nominees List, Christian Daily, (Sept. 14, 2020), https://www.christianitydaily.com/articles/9846/20200914/pro-life-groups-support-trump-supreme-court-nominees-list.htm.
[20] Hurst, 202 So. 3d at 77; “[I]t is the finding of an aggravating circumstance that exposes the defendant to a death sentence” State v. Poole, 297 So. 3d, 487, 503 (Fla. 2020).
[21] State v. Poole, 297 So. 3d, 487, 515 (Fla. 2020) (Labarga, J., dissenting).
[22] See Scott E. Sundby, War and Peace in the Jury Room: How Capital Juries Reach Unanimity, 62 Hastings L.J. 213 (2010); Kate Riordan, Ten Angry Men: Unanimous Jury Verdicts in Criminal Trials and Incorporation After McDonald, 101 J. Crim. L & Criminology 1403 (2013).
[23] Florida Supreme Court “Recedes” from Major Death Penalty Decision Creating Uncertainty about Status of Dozen of Cases, ABA, (March 10, 2020).
[24] Death Penalty, Equal Justice Initiative, https://eji.org/issues/death-penalty/ (last visited Feb. 7, 2022).
[25] Equal Justice Initiative, Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror, (3rd ed. 2017).
[26] Ray Downs, Florida Lynched More Black People Per Capita Than Any Other State, According to Report, Broward Palm Beach New Times (Feb. 11, 2015) https://www.browardpalmbeach.com/news/florida-lynched-more-black-people-per-capita-than-any-other-state-according-to-report-6470940?showFullText=true.
[27] Total Number of Executions in the United States from 1976 to 2021, by State, Statista (Dec. 2021) https://www.statista.com/statistics/199090/total-number-of-executions-in-the-us-by-state/.
[28] Death Penalty Information Center, Death Row; https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/death-row/overview.
