The Florida Supreme Court has decided the case of Timothy Hurst on remand from the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Hurst v. Florida. The majority wrongly interpreted the high court decision to require that the jury be unanimous in all of its decisions, not just the finding of the death-eligibility circumstance.
To insulate its error from a likely reversal by the high court, the Florida Supreme Court cynically added the state constitution as an additional ground for its holding, casually tossing out forty years of precedent from the restoration of capital punishment in the 1970s until the decision in Hurst. Stare decisis? We don't need no stinking stare decisis.
When Florida's Legislature was considering how to fix its statute in light of Hurst, the debate was all about whether to authorize a less-than-unanimous penalty verdict or go for the single-juror-veto law that lets one juror impose his will over the objection of the other 11. I tried to tell them that the Arizona/California method of requiring the jury to be unanimous one way or the other was the way to go, and they blew me off. Maybe now they will listen?
To insulate its error from a likely reversal by the high court, the Florida Supreme Court cynically added the state constitution as an additional ground for its holding, casually tossing out forty years of precedent from the restoration of capital punishment in the 1970s until the decision in Hurst. Stare decisis? We don't need no stinking stare decisis.
When Florida's Legislature was considering how to fix its statute in light of Hurst, the debate was all about whether to authorize a less-than-unanimous penalty verdict or go for the single-juror-veto law that lets one juror impose his will over the objection of the other 11. I tried to tell them that the Arizona/California method of requiring the jury to be unanimous one way or the other was the way to go, and they blew me off. Maybe now they will listen?
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