The Florida Legislature on Tuesday passed a bill that provides for automatic imposition of the death penalty for certain people convicted of a capital offense, despite longstanding precedent making clear that mandatory death penalty laws are unconstitutional.
In 1976, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down mandatory death penalty schemes as unconstitutional. Tracing the history of these laws, the Court observed in Woodson v. North Carolina that, in the 1830s, lawmakers started rejecting automatic death penalty statutes “as unduly harsh and unworkably rigid” because juries simply refused to convict in cases where they found the death penalty inappropriate.
By 1963, every state and the federal government had replaced their automatic death penalty statutes with discretionary jury sentencing.
When the Court held in 1972 that unbridled discretion had led to unconstitutionally arbitrary and unreliable sentencing decisions, Florida and other states implemented laws that guide sentencing discretion by requiring jurors to consider the character and record of the individual offender and the circumstances of the particular offense. The Court upheld those laws, holding that such individualized consideration is “a constitutionally indispensable part of the process of inflicting the penalty of death.”
But North Carolina took the opposite approach—it eliminated discretion and reverted to a mandatory death penalty scheme. The Court struck down the automatic death penalty law because mandatory schemes lack the safeguards against arbitrary and unreliable death sentences that the Constitution requires.
“A process that accords no significance to relevant facets of the character and record of the individual offender or the circumstances of the particular offense excludes from consideration in fixing the ultimate punishment of death the possibility of compassionate or mitigating factors stemming from the diverse frailties of humankind,” the Woodson Court wrote. “It treats all persons convicted of a designated offense not as uniquely individual human beings, but as members of a faceless, undifferentiated mass to be subjected to the blind infliction of the penalty of death.”
The bill that passed by a narrow 21-16 vote in the Florida state senate this week makes certain disfavored defendants—people who are “unlawfully present” in the U.S.—subject to an automatic death sentence.
This mandatory death penalty provision mirrors the law struck down as unconstitutional nearly five decades ago. It violates decades of settled law and, by precluding the possibility that mitigating evidence might justify a sentence less than death, threatens to undermine the reliability of death sentences.