The Florida Supreme Court ruled Thursday that the unanimous death penalty given to a man who murdered and raped a prison guard in Volusia County in 2008 is still constitutional.
Enoch Hall’s death sentence was upheld, despite multiple recent court rulings that dealt blows to Florida’s death penalty process, which courts said gave too much power to judges and not enough to juries.
The legal disagreements stemmed from the second phase of capital trials, after the defendant is found guilty, in which jurors must decide what is the appropriate penalty. The penalty phase exists only in capital cases; in other cases, judges decide what the appropriate sentence should be.
Until early 2016, jurors did not have to be unanimous for defendants to get the death penalty. If at least seven of the 12 jurors found that someone should be put to death, the judge sentenced the person to execution.
But last January, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the way Florida sentenced people to death was not constitutional. The ruling relied on a 2002 Supreme Court case called Ring v. Arizona, in which the court said the power to give someone the death penalty should rest with juries, not judges.
The court did not rule on whether the executions themselves were constitutional, only the legal process that brought defendants to death row.
In the year since, the state legislators passed a new sentencing scheme that said just 10 of 12 jurors had to vote for the death penalty. That law was struck down, too. Florida technically does not have a valid death penalty statute on the books at the moment, which has lead to some legal delays.
In December, the state Supreme Court ruled that any inmate who got a death penalty verdict since the Ring decision in 2002 can ask for a new sentencing hearing, and perhaps be sentenced to life in prison instead of death if jurors do not come to a unanimous decision.
But Hall is one of few death row inmates whose case was decided unanimously: All 12 jurors in his trial said he should get the death penalty. Because of that, he is not eligible for a new sentence, the court ruled.
In the written decision, justices called Hall's case “egregious.”
He was serving two life sentences in the Tomoka Correctional Institution in Volusia County for kidnapping and sexual battery in June 2008 when he stabbed 50-year-old Corrections Officer Donna Fitzgerald 22 times with a shank, records show.
None of the 383 people on death row in Florida have execution dates set. The last person put to death was Oscar Ray Bolin, Jr., convicted in the 1986 murders of three Tampa-area women and given a lethal injection in January of 2016.
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