TALLAHASSEE — After issuing another batch of 10 rulings Friday, the Florida Supreme Court this week rejected a total of 40 death-penalty appeals on similar legal grounds.
The 40 appeals all were filed on behalf of Death Row inmates who received their sentences before June 2002, though the Supreme Court’s decision to release four large batches of rulings in a week was highly unusual.
The appeals stemmed from a 2016 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in a case known as Hurst v. Florida and a subsequent Florida Supreme Court decision.
The 2016 U.S. Supreme Court ruling found Florida’s death-penalty sentencing system was unconstitutional because it gave too much authority to judges, instead of juries.
The subsequent Florida Supreme Court ruling said juries must unanimously agree on critical findings before judges can impose death sentences and must unanimously recommend the death penalty.
But the Florida Supreme Court made the new sentencing requirements apply to cases since June 2002.
That is when the U.S. Supreme Court issued a ruling known as Ring v. Arizona that was a premise for striking down Florida’s death-penalty sentencing system in 2016.
In each of the cases this week, the Death Row inmates had been sentenced to death before the Ring decision and argued that the new unanimity requirements should also apply to their cases.
Among them was Eric Branch, convicted of killing a University of West Florida woman one week after raping a Panama City Beach woman in 1993.
Source: The News Service of Florida, January 27, 2018
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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
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