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Date: November 22, 2024 Fri
Time: 12:21 pm
Time: 12:21 pm
Results for supreme court case
1 results foundAuthor: Amnesty International Title: USA: Darkness Visible in the Sunshine State: The Death Penalty in Florida Summary: Florida promotes itself as a destination for tourists and a hub for regional and international trade. It is less well-known as a diehard proponent of a cruel policy discarded by much of the world. This Amnesty International report aims to shine a light on this dark side of The Sunshine State. Florida has the second largest death row in the USA, and is ranked fourth among the states in the number of executions carried out since 1976 when the US Supreme Court approved new capital laws. At a time where other states have been rethinking the death penalty, Florida shows few signs of joining them. Since 2010, Virginia and Oklahoma, the states now in second and third position on this execution table, have carried out 29 executions between them. Florida has conducted 28. And in the 10 years to the end of 2017, Florida sent more people to death row than Texas, Virginia, Oklahoma, Missouri and Georgia (fifth and sixth in the execution ranking) combined. In January 2016 Florida’s legislators were presented with a golden opportunity to rethink their state’s attachment to the death penalty. In Hurst v. Florida, the US Supreme Court found Florida’s capital sentencing statute unconstitutional because it gave juries only an advisory role in death sentencing, which was incompatible with the Court’s 2002 Ring v. Arizona decision that the Constitution requires juries rather than judges to make the factual findings necessary to sentence a defendant to death. The legislature responded, not with any serious assessment of capital justice, but by quickly revising the statute to allow death sentencing to resume. The legislature's first revision, promoted by Florida’s county prosecutorial community, was found unconstitutional by the Florida Supreme Court for not requiring jury unanimity on death sentencing. The law was revised again to remedy this fault. A few months before Hurst, in June 2015, US Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, joined by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, had argued that the time had come for the Court to revisit the constitutionality of the death penalty in the USA, given the evidence of error and arbitrariness in its application. They pointed out that the death penalty’s constitutionality hinges on it being limited to the so-called "worst of the worst", that is "those who commit a narrow category of the most serious crimes and whose extreme culpability makes them the most deserving of execution" (emphasis added). They argued that it was not being so limited - pointing to race, geography and other factors as improper influences on capital outcomes. Florida ticked all the boxes of flaws highlighted by the Justices. In May 2016, Justices Breyer and Ginsburg pushed again, this time in the case of a prisoner who was 18 at the time of the crime, had an IQ of 74, and was sentenced to death in a jurisdiction in Louisiana that accounted for a disproportionate number of death sentences. Given the ban on the execution of people with intellectual disability and those under 18 at the time of the crime, this death sentence was clearly pushing up against what had been categorically unconstitutional for more than a decade. The case begged the question - can a borderline intellectually disabled teenager really be among the "worst of the worst"? This report brings this same question to Florida’s use of the death penalty against young adults and individuals with mental or intellectual disabilities. In 2016, over 10% of prisoners on Florida’s death row had been sent there for crimes committed when they were 18, 19 or 20 years old. Some of them, and others from older age brackets, had mental disabilities or possible intellectual disability. However, this report first addresses how the Florida Supreme Court has made Hurst only partially retroactive. Executions of those deemed not to be entitled to Hurst relief began in August 2017. That same month, Florida Supreme Court Justice Barbara Pariente reiterated her view that Hurst should have "full retroactivity" and that anything less simply added "another layer of arbitrariness" to what US Supreme Court Justices Breyer and Ginsburg had described about the death penalty in the USA not being reserved for the "worst of the worst". She was in the minority, however. Details: United Kingdom, 2018. 76p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed October 3, 2018 at: https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/amr51/8959/2018/en/ Year: 2018 Country: United States URL: https://www.amnesty.org/download/Documents/AMR5189592018ENGLISH.PDF Shelf Number: 151525 Keywords: Capital Punishment Death Penalty Death Row Supreme Court Case |