Supreme Court to rule in Florida death penalty case

[JURIST]

The US Supreme Court [official website] on Monday granted certiorari [order list, PDF] in Hurst v. Florida [docket; cert. petition, PDF ] to determine "whether Florida's death sentencing scheme violated the Sixth ... or Eighth Amendment." This court granted certiorari in light of its decision in Ring v. Arizona [opinion], in which it held that a sentencing judge, sitting without a jury, may not "find an aggravating circumstance necessary for imposition of the death penalty." In the case at hand, Timothy Hurst was convicted and sentenced to death in 1998 for one count of first degree murder. It was found that the murder was "especially heinous, atrocious, or cruel," and thus justified the sentence. Although it was found that Hurst suffered from Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, and thus was of "limited intellectual capacity," the court did not consider this as mitigation, and thus did not assign it any weight.