A national group that tracks the death penalty puts out an annual report saying that Florida had the most death sentences in the country this year. This seems to be because Gov. Ron DeSantis was able to get rid of the rule that a unanimous jury recommendation be made.
According to the Death Penalty Information Center, 26 people were put to death in the US in 2024. This is a group that says it doesn’t have an opinion on the death penalty but is critical of how it is used.
This year, people were put to death in ten states, but most of them were in just four: Alabama, California, Florida, and Texas. Seven people were put to death in Florida, six in Texas, four in Alabama, and three in California.
About one-third of the 26 new death sentences were given without a majority vote from the jury. Six of these sentences were given in Florida and three were given in Alabama.
Laws in Florida have changed
In the last twenty years, Florida’s death penalty rule has been changed several times. For example, it now requires a unanimous jury recommendation after decisions from both the U.S. Supreme Court and the state Supreme Court.
In 2018, Nikolas Cruz killed 17 students and staff at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland. After the jury failed to recommend the death penalty, DeSantis pushed to get rid of the unanimous rule. In April 2023, DeSantis signed the bill that lets an 8–4 vote come up with a death sentence.
“Once a fatally ill person is found guilty by a jury that agrees on everything, one juror should not be able to block the death sentence,” DeSantis said at the time. “I’m proud to sign a bill that will make sure families in Florida get the justice they deserve and stop them from having to go through what the Parkland families are going through.”
The Florida Supreme Court heard oral arguments last week in the case of Michael James Jackson. Jackson is challenging the constitutionality of the new law, and the American Civil Liberties Union is his lawyer. By a vote of 8-4, the jurors said that Jackson should be put to death.
Some groups in the area and across the country have said that the fact that the jury did not agree on the sentence goes against the Eighth Amendment, which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment, and the Fourteenth Amendment, which protects equal protection and due process.
According to the Death Penalty Information Center, there were more new death sentences and executions than in 2023, but still a lot less than there were 20 years ago, when there were 130 new death sentences and 59 killings.
The center’s executive director, Robin M. Maher, said that a new poll shows that most adults between the ages of 18 and 43 are now against the death sentence. This means that there may be a “steady decline of support in the future” for the death penalty.
The center found that 25 people had been executed in nine states in the past year. One of them was in Florida, for the 1994 murder of John Edwards, a student at Florida State University who was camping with his sister in the Ocala National Forest. The person who was executed was Loran Cole.