Florida Supreme Court: Halt death penalty trials
ORLANDO, Fla. — The Florida Supreme Court on Wednesday issued a one-paragraph order, telling Florida prosecutors and judges for the second time in three months that the state’s death penalty statute is unconstitutional and “cannot be applied to pending prosecutions.”
It comes one day after the chief judge for Seminole and Brevard counties, John Galluzzo, assembled a jury pool for a capital murder trial in Sanford.
He had concluded that he could lawfully move forward with the guilt phase of a death penalty trial if he delayed the sentencing phase until after the Florida Legislature rewrites the statute.
Galluzzo’s trial came to an abrupt halt after the person pushing him to hold it, State Attorney Phil Archer, reversed course and offered the defendant, 20-yearold Davion Stewart of Altamonte Springs, a plea deal that he accepted: life in prison.
On Tuesday Archer defended his decision to move forward with the trial, saying a series of Florida Supreme Court rulings had been confusing and he believed the high court would allow capital murder trials to continue, so long as certain rights of a defendant were protected, including one requiring that all 12 members of the jury recommend the death penalty.
“There’s still the option of proceeding on a death penalty case,” he said.
Not according to the Florida Supreme Court’s Wednesday order, which repeated and highlighted the key holding of its Oct. 14 opinion.
It had invalidated the law “as a whole,” the court wrote in its Wednesday’s order. “Thus, the Act ‘cannot be applied to pending prosecutions.’”
The key flaw, the court wrote in both orders, was that the statute allowed the death penalty in cases in which the jury vote was 10-2 or 11-1 in favor of death. The vote must be unanimous, it said.
Buddy Jacobs, a Jacksonville attorney and lawyer for the Florida Prosecuting Attorneys Association, said the Wednesday order means prosecutors and judges statewide may not move forward with death penalty trials.
Archer said Tuesday that Stewart deserved the ultimate punishment because he had so brutally murdered his victim: Jackie Hammer, his 81-year-old neighbor who walked with a cane.
Stewart beat and stomped on Hammer, fracturing his skull and breaking many of the bones in his chest, then slashed his throat with a box cutter, said Assistant State Attorney Bryanna Bynum.
Wednesday’s order, which was signed by five of the high court’s seven justices, also appeared to telegraph how it would rule in an Orange County murder case.
Juan Rosario is accused of beating an 83-year-old woman to death and setting her home on fire in 2013.
Circuit Judge Heather Higbee had ruled that prosecutors could not put him on trial and seek the death penalty because it had been declared unconstitutional, but prosecutors appealed, and the Fifth District Court of Appeal reversed. That matter is now pending with the state’s high court.