In Louisiana, two judges have scheduled two people to be killed on two consecutive days next month, the Louisiana Illuminator reported. According to the paper, a DeSoto Parish judge issued a death warrant for March 17 for 81-year-old Christopher Sepulvado, sentenced to die for the 1992 murder of his 6-year-old stepson, Wesley Allen Mercer, in 1992. And, a St. Tammany Parish judge issued a death warrant for March 18 for 46-year-old Jessie Hoffman, convicted of killing 28-year-old Mary Elliot in 1996. Both men could be killed by nitrogen hypoxia, a method of execution approved by lawmakers last year, according to the Illuminator. If they proceed, the executions will be the first since 2010, a ten-year pause necessitated by the state’s inability to obtain lethal injection drugs.
In Florida, the state attorney dropped two first-degree murder convictions and life sentences facing Corey Smith, instead allowing him to plead guilty to second-degree murder and a 30-year sentence, “6 South Florida” reported earlier this month because of prosecutorial misconduct which resulted in the judge removing two prosecutors from the case. The 52-year-old Smith has already served 24 years on the previous charges and will remain in prison on a 60-year federal drug trafficking sentence, which, according to 6 South Florida, means he won’t be released until 2051 when he will be 79.
Also, in Florida, a jury voted 8-4 to resentence Kim Jackson to life in prison without parole instead of death, the newsletter “Tracking Florida’s Death Penalty,” reported. Jackson was sentenced to death in 2013 for the 2004 murder of 49-year-old Debra Pearce after a jury recommended death by a vote of 8-4. He was granted a new penalty phase in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Hurst v. Florida (2016), which found that the state’s capital sentencing scheme was unconstitutional because the judge, not the jury, was responsible for identifying the facts necessary for imposing the death penalty, according to Justia Law. Hurst ruled that a jury must unanimously identify the facts and recommend a death sentence.
And again in Florida, under a bill signed into law by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis last week, an undocumented immigrant convicted of a capital crime, including first-degree murder or the rape of a child under the age of 12, will be sentenced to death, the Tallahassee Democrat (USA TODAY Network) reported. “Of course, a “mandatory” or “automatic” death penalty is clearly unconstitutional, and has been declared so across the nation for nearly 50 years. This is because the ultimate punishment of death, if a state chooses to seek it, can only be imposed after an individualized proceeding,” Executive Director of Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty Maria DeLiberato stated.
In Georgia, a bipartisan proposal introduced this month in the state House of Representatives would lower the standard of proof to a preponderance of the evidence instead of “beyond a reasonable doubt” for defendants in capital cases with an intellectual disability, WALB News 10 reported. WALB notes the bill stipulates that the court must determine a defendant’s intellectual capabilities pretrial, before a jury is selected. The station also notes that if passed, the bill would not be retroactive, and none of the 34 people currently on death row would be eligible for appeal. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, “Although Georgia was the first state to pass a law exempting people with intellectual disabilities from the death penalty, it has continued to carry out executions of people with this condition more than 30 years later.”
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