Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is expected to sign into law a bill that would no longer require a jury to vote unanimously to condemn an offender to death.
Current Florida law requires unanimity among jurors before they can recommend a sentence of death. The bill, which passed the Senate last month before the House overwhelmingly approved it on Thursday, would lower that threshold to require just two-thirds of all 12 jurors, to recommend a death sentence.
The proposed change would affect only the sentencing process, meaning that a jury would still need a unanimous vote to convict a defendant before moving on to the penalty phase.
Republican State Rep. Berny Jacques, the sponsor of the House version of the bill, said the measure is meant to prevent “activist jurors” from helping convicted offenders escape the deaths they deserve.
A former prosecutor, Jacques defined an “activist juror” as a juror “who decides to act outside the law and then places his own personal beliefs above what is required in the law.”
“You simply cannot allow a small handful of activist jurors to derail the full administration of justice when individuals are found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt and meet the qualifications for the death penalty,” Jacques said in a statement on Friday. “To do so would be simply a travesty.”
As recently as 2016, Florida was one of the few states that allowed just a simple majority of the jury to recommend the death penalty. That changed when the U.S. Supreme Court issued an 8–1 ruling that year, declaring that part of Florida’s capital sentencing statute unconstitutional.
“The Sixth Amendment requires a jury, not a judge, to find each fact necessary to impose a sentence of death,” Sotomayor wrote. “A jury’s mere recommendation is not enough.”
The Supreme Court ruling prompted the state legislature to revamp the law by rising the bar to allow a 10–2 majority to recommend the death penalty. Eventually, in 2017, the legislature adopted the current law that requires a unanimous jury vote.
