MIAMI – Florida will become the state with the lowest threshold for imposing the death penalty under legislation signed by Governor Ron DeSantis on Thursday, which will allow juries to recommend the death penalty without a unanimous vote.
The change, which would allow jurors to recommend the death penalty with an 8-to-4 vote, was prompted by a Florida jury’s decision last year to sentence a convicted murderer to life in prison without parole. killed 17 people in the 2018 mass shooting in. Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland. The judge voted 9 to 3 in favor of the death penalty in that case, but the judge could not impose it unless every juror voted in favor.
Mr. DeSantis, who is traveling the country ahead of the anticipated 2024 Republican presidential campaign, received a silent signing of the law Thursday in his office, along with several lawmakers and parents of the Parkland victims.
“Once a defendant in a capital case is found guilty by a unanimous jury, a jury should not be able to veto a capital sentence,” he said in a you statement.
Lawmakers have given several legislative priorities to Mr. DeSantis in their annual session, which is scheduled to end in two weeks. The moves give the governor high-profile social issues to fill in as he tries to court Republican donors and voters with a message that his aggressive approach to running Florida can work. in the country. Last week, Mr. DeSantis signed a six-week abortion ban, one of the strictest in the country.
Among the bills currently awaiting his desk is one that would allow the death penalty to be imposed on defendants convicted of sexual battery against children.
Almost all of the 27 states that allow the death penalty require unanimous sentencing votes by juries. The new Florida threshold is lower than the 10-to-2 majority required in Alabama. Indiana and Missouri allow judges to decide the sentence when juries are split.
At least 30 inmates sentenced to death in Florida have since been exonerated, more than any other state, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, a nonprofit research organization that opposes the death penalty. More than 300 inmates remain on Florida’s death row.
“It should be difficult to send someone to the death penalty,” said Randolph Bracy, a former Democratic state senator from Orlando, who sponsored legislation in 2017 to require a unanimous jury vote to impose the death penalty. “Florida has the highest rate of wrongful conviction, I think, in the country,” he added. “We need that benchmark to make sure we’re doing the right thing.”
He said he expects the new law to be challenged in court.
The acquittal of the Parkland high school shooter last October has angered many of the victims’ families, who feel that suffering through a harrowing trial would at least result in a near-certain death sentence. But the jury’s 9-to-3 vote for death failed to reach the state’s required unanimity, prompting some families to publicly question what the death penalty is for, if not for the perpetrator of a mass shooting that killed 14 teenagers and three adults.
A juror later described frustrating and broken deliberations in which the majority could barely join a jury that decided against death because it considered the gunman mentally ill.
Shortly after, Mr. DeSantis, a Republican, and other state lawmakers have vowed to overturn a 2017 Florida law requiring a unanimous jury vote. That law followed a 2016 Florida Supreme Court decision that struck down the state’s previous requirement of a simple majority vote — seven of 12 jurors — to impose the death penalty in the state.
In 2020, the state Supreme Court, which once had many conservative justices in its ranks, published a non-binding opinion that the unanimity requirement could be overturned. But lawmakers did not discuss the matter until Nikolas Cruz, the Parkland gunman, avoided the death penalty.
Mr. Cruz pleaded guilty to 17 counts of murder, for the people he killed at the school on February 14, 2018, and 17 counts of attempted murder, for the people he injured. The jury of seven men and five women must weigh aggravating factors to justify the death penalty, as well as mitigating circumstances to save his life.
The new law eliminating the unanimity requirement received bipartisan support in the Florida Legislature, where Republicans hold supermajorities in the House of Representatives and the Senate. Some Republicans voted against it, while many Democrats voted in favor, including some from liberal Broward County, where Parkland is located.
One of the Republicans who opposed the measure, State Representative Mike Beltran of Riverview, an attorney, said that while he believes the Parkland gunman should have been sentenced to death, state law should continue to require the unanimous jury in imposing the death penalty.
Mr. DeSantis signed two death warrants in his first term, a small number compared to previous Republican governors. Since his re-election in 2022, he has signed three more; two of those executions have been carried out and the third is scheduled for May.
