Opinion ID: 1907308
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 8

Heading: invalidity of override under ring

Text: While I have consistently disagreed with this Court's refusal to apply the Sixth Amendment requirements laid out in Apprendi and Ring, and have previously written to voice my disagreement with the Court's failure to make an honest assessment of how Apprendi and Ring impact Florida's death penalty jurisprudential landscape, [17] it is inescapable that Ring precludes the decision that the majority reaches today. As Justice Lewis has eloquently declared: Based upon the foregoing, although I concur in the result, I cannot concur in the silent reasoning provided by the majority as a basis for its conclusions. As detailed above, I am gravely concerned regarding the constitutionality of jury overrides under Ring and I cannot silently afford blind adherence to authorities which are now in apparent irreconcilable conflict with Ring. Additionally, I also conclude that Florida's standard jury instructions need immediate attention. In my view, there are more than mere contentions of conflict, which the majority is willing to acknowledge, there are facially irreconcilable conflicts which the majority does not acknowledge. Bottoson v. Moore, 833 So.2d 693, 734 (Fla. 2002) (Lewis, J., concurring in result only). Today, Justice Lewis's concerns have come true in an actual case where a jury's finding has been voided by a judge and the majority has approved that override. Rather than determine what role the jury should be playing in Florida in order to comply with Ring and the Sixth Amendment, the majority essentially eviscerates the role of a jury in identifying the facts necessary to sentence an individual to death. [18] The majority ignores the fact that the Eighth Amendment procedural protections built into Florida's sentencing scheme occur at the penalty phase of the trial. Instead of considering what happened at the penalty phase of the trial, and the inconvenient fact that the jury found that Marshall should be given a life sentence, the majority erroneously equates the existence of Marshall's prior violent felonies with a finding of the facts necessary to impose the death sentence.