The Demographics of Florida's Death Penalty

Abstract

As the federal appeals court with jurisdiction over Florida and Alabama—two leaders in capital punishment in the United States, the Eleventh Circuit reviews several claims each year related to capital punishment. Florida, a long-time leader in capital punishment in the United States, is home to one of the largest death row populations in the country. Thus, understanding Florida’s capital sentencing scheme is important in understanding capital punishment nationwide. This Article reviews the demographics of Florida’s death row population as well as how defendants are sentenced to death and ultimately executed in Florida. In doing so, the Article finds that while age is not a factor upon which murder/manslaughter defendants are discriminated in the sentencing process, gender and race are. Focusing on the death penalty, the gender discrimination appears consistent; however, the racial discrimination does not. The racial, age, and ethnic makeup of Florida’s death row and, more specifically, those who are executed in Florida is almost completely unpredictable. Further, in light of the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision in Hurst v. Florida and the Supreme Court of Florida’s decisions on remand in Hurst and other related decisions, which, together, caused a paradigm shift in capital sentencing, this Article examines how the Supreme Court of Florida’s post-Hurst framework—which the Eleventh Circuit, in reviewing several federal habeas claims since Hurst, has also been called upon to review and implement–affected Florida’s death row empirically. For example, the Article finds that the Court’s decisions regarding the retroactivity of Hurst split Florida’s death row in half.