G. Death Votes and Direct Appeal Decisions

In addition to the jury's vote on whether to impose a death or life sentence, the number of votes for death (in cases where the majority voted for death) is an important correlate of decisions in capital cases by the Florida Supreme Court. Through the end of 2000, there had been 819 post-Furman cases decided by the Florida Supreme Court on direct appeal in which a defendant was sentenced to death following a jury recommendation of death. In 31 of those cases, the death sentence was reimposed by the trial court after a remand ordered by appellate courts (and there had been a jury recommendation of death in the original sentencing proceeding). In 154 other cases, while it is known that the majority of the jury voted to recommend death, the exact vote is unknown.

In the remaining 634 cases, 117 had seven jurors vote for death, 113 had 8 jurors vote for death, 117 had nine votes for death, 100 had 10 votes for death, 75 had eleven votes for death, and 112 had unanimous votes for death. Further examination shows that the more votes for death, the higher the probability that the case will be affirmed by the Florida Supreme Court on direct appeal:

Jury Votes for Death 7 8 9 10 11 12

. # of Cases 117 113 117 100 75 112

% Affirmed on Direct Appeal .470 .504 .530 .540 .627 .643

This analysis supports the observations of former Florida Attorney General Robert Shevin, who, as a member of the Supreme Court Workload Commission, earlier this year urged the legislature to require unanimous, or at least "super-majority" 9-3 votes, before a death sentence could be imposed. This, argued Shevin, would weed out cases from the Florida Supreme Court's workload that ultimately are likely to be reduced to life. Although Shevin's proposal was defeated 6-3, the panel did unanimously recommend that the legislature give more study to the issue.[14] That, of course, is the last we have heard of it.

H. Race Issues

Table 3 lists the names of the 51 people executed in Florida since 1979, their races, and the races of their victims. Florida, which in the early 1980s was the top executing state in the U.S., lost that dubious distinction to Texas, and then quickly fell into third place behind Virginia, and now, since July 11, 2001, is tied for Missouri for third place.[15]

Unfortunately, in-depth research on homicide in Florida is all but impossible, as there are no reliable homicide statistics from 1988, 1989, 1990, or 1991, and the data from 1996 and 1997 are available only in an archaic computer program that no one can read. Nevertheless, the data that are available indicate that one way to distinguish the 51 from the thousands of other murders in Florida is race of the victim.

In the dozen years ending in 1987, approximately 53 percent of those murdered in Florida were white, and 47 percent were black.[16] With no recent data, we can only assume that these racial breakdowns have not changed. However, as Table 3 suggests, judges and juries in Florida are very reluctant to sentence to death people who have murdered African Americans. Only 6 of the 51 people executed in Florida over the past 25 years were executed for killing blacks. African Americans are 47 percent of the homicide victims in Florida, but only 12 percent of those executed were convicted of killing blacks. Each of the six people executed for killing blacks was themselves black. No white person has ever been executed in the history of the state of Florida for killing an African American.

Of the six, two received jury recommendations of life imprisonment. Of the four people executed in Florida since 1976 with jury recommendations of life, two were defendants with black victims.

It is also interesting to note that each of the six cases where people were executed for killing blacks were unusually aggravated or contained other circumstances that help explain the death sentence. James Dupree Henry was executed in 1984 for killing one of the most prominent black citizens in Central Florida. He also slightly wounded a white police officer when being arrested. When a colleague and I examined the articles in the Orlando Sentinel about the case from the time of the murder to the time Henry was sentenced to death, we found that 61 percent of the coverage was about the wounded police officer, and only 28 percent was devoted to the murdered black man. Beauford White and Marvin Francois were codefendants executed for killing blacks; in this case they were convicted of killing six people. Pedro Medina, who was executed despite pleas from the daughter of the victim and doubts about his guilt expressed by her and three members of the Florida Supreme Court. Medina was not only black but also a Mariel refugee, giving him an especially low status in the minds of predominately white prosecutors and jurors. Bobbie Francis was convicted of torturing and shooting a confidential police informant in 1975 in Key West. The last person executed for killing a black person was Bennie Demps, who was convicted on questionable evidence of a prison murder and executed last summer. Demps had been on death row in 1972 when all death sentences in Florida were vacated.

Table 4 shows that there has been some modest increase in death sentences for those who kill blacks, although it is clear that the reluctance to sentence people to death for killing African Americans in Florida continues to the present day. Excluding those who killed Hispanics, other minorities, and multiple victims with mixed races, we can see that during the 1970s about 90 percent of those sentenced to death were convicted of killing whites. This dropped to 86 percent of all death sentences handed down from 1981 through 1990, and 78 percent of the death sentences from 1991 through 2000. So, our best estimates are that today, whites are just over half of the homicide victims in Florida (53 percent), but over 3/4 of the death sentences, not 1/2, are imposed on those convicted of killing whites.

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