Court: 200 Florida death sentences unconstitutional

ORLANDO, Fla. — The Florida Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that more than half the people on Florida’s death row may be entitled to new sentencing hearings because of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling earlier this year that found the state’s death penalty unconstitutional.

The decision covers more than 200 inmates — and includes all of those who were sentenced after 2002 or whose appeals were not final by that year.

It is a legal decision that death row inmates, prosecutors, defense attorneys and the families of murder victims have awaited since January, when it became clear that Florida needed to rework its death penalty statute to bring it into line with the way other states handled those cases, specifically by requiring that juries — not judges — make the key findings required to impose a death sentence.

It also suggests that trial courts across Florida are about to be swamped by requests from death row inmates, asking to be resentenced and nearly all of them will be granted.

That would be a herculean task for trial judges, prosecutors and defense attorneys, said Orange-Osceola Public Defender Robert Wesley, who predicted the result would be a backlog that might take ten years to unjam.

Said former Circuit Judge O.H. Eaton Jr., “There’s going to be one hell of a lot of determinations as to whether these people are entitled to new penalty phases.”

The ruling applies to more than 40 Central Florida convicted murderers.

They include Bessman Okafor, who in 2012 murdered an Orange County man who was about to testify against him at a home invasion trial; ax murderer John Buzia, a handyman convicted of killing an elderly Seminole County man in 2004; and Michael Gordon Reynolds, who beat and stabbed to death a Seminole County father, mother and 11-year-old daughter in 1998.

In Orange and Osceola counties 10 of 24 death row inmates could be eligible for new sentences, said Assistant State Attorney Ken Nunnelley.