Opinion ID: 1988657
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Florida Override Experience

Text: Delaware adopted a death penalty statute in 1991 that was modeled on the Florida statute. [38] Accordingly, the summary of the Florida jury override system in a 1991 law review article by Michael Mello is didactic. [39] Table 1 that is attached to the Mello article shows that in the fifteen year span of Florida's post- Furman statute, jury life recommendation overrides by trial judges were reversed in seventy-four percent of the cases by the Florida Supreme Court. The same article then states that the figures in Table 1 become more significant when they are divided into three time periods. From 1974 (when the first override case reached the Florida Supreme Court) until the end of 1983 (just before certiorari review was granted in Spaziano v. Florida ), sixteen of sixty-two life overrides were affirmed. In 1984 and 1985  during the pendency of Spaziano v. Florida in the United States Supreme Court and the year after Spaziano was decided  affirmances by the Florida court were significantly more frequent: twelve of eighteen (66.7%). But from 1986 through May 1990, only two of thirty-two (6.25%) were affirmed. [40] Therefore, in the four years that immediately preceded the enactment of the Delaware statute in 1991, death sentences imposed by jury overrides were reversed by the Florida Supreme Court in more than ninety-three percent of the relevant cases. Conversely, death sentences imposed by overrides of jury life recommendations survived appellate review in less than seven percent of the cases during that four-year period. According to a subsequent study, the Florida Supreme Court continues to affirm jury override death sentences in only a few cases. [41] Garden is the first case, and may be the only case, in which this Court applies the Tedder standard to review a trial judge's decision to impose a death sentence by overriding a jury recommendation of life. [42] The Florida Supreme Court, however, has applied the Tedder standard in reviewing more than 140 jury override cases. [43] Since very few death sentences imposed by jury overrides have been affirmed by the Florida Supreme Court, it is logical for this Court to look at the facts in some of those Florida cases where the Tedder standard was applied and the judge's decision to impose death by overriding the jury's recommendation of life were affirmed.