Florida has America's most worrying death penalty law

On April 20th, 2023, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis changed the Sunshine State's history forever when he signed a bill into law that fundamentally transformed how convicted criminals could be put to death by removing the necessity of a unanimous jury vote.

Senate Bill 450 reduced the number of jurors needed to recommend the death penalty from 12 to 8 according to CNN, a number that the news organization noted made Florida the state with the lowest threshold of any in the union that still allowed capital punishment.

The move set off alarm bells across the country but there was a series of steps that pushed Florida lawmakers to make the unprecedented choice of removing the state's unanimous jury vote required to put a criminal to death. This is how Florida came to have one of the most regressive death penalties in America.

In 2017, Florida changed the laws around how it convicted defendants and required jurors to vote on a death penalty conviction only after they had first unanimously decided that a defendant was guilty, a situation that has caused major political issues.

Calls to move towards a less stringent death penalty in Florida came shortly after a deadlocked jury allowed Parkland shooter Nikolas Cruz to avoid the death penalty on a 9-3 vote in October 2022 in sentencing that occurred after he was found guilty of his crimes. 

In 2018 Cruz killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in what became one of the most infamous mass killings in modern American history. The fact that he was not sentenced to the death penalty made a lot of citizens and politicians in the state of Florida angry. 

Heavy criticism followed the decision to not sentence Cruz to the death penalty, and in November 2022, NPR reported the state was poised to change its death penalty laws. The process took nearly two years before a bill changing the state's death penalty requirements reached its Governor.

On April 13th, Florida’s Republican-led state house passed a measure in an 80-30 vote that would remove the need for a unanimous jury vote on capital punishment cases. Debate at the time revealed what some politicians thought about the necessity of the measure. 

“We all grieve for the families of Parkland and that community. But what that verdict did do was expose a flaw in the current system,” Florida state Senator Blaise Ingogolia said according to the Washington Times. 

Florida's new death penalty law went into effect the date that it was signed, which means that criminals can now be sentenced to the death penalty in the state with a vote of just 8 jurors.

Currently, Alabama is the only other state in America that does not require a unanimous vote to put its defendants to death, requiring only 10 of 12 jurors to make the decision according to the Death Penalty Information Center.