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Fred Anderson, Jr. v. Florida
Paid petition · Supreme Court of Florida, No. SC18-175 · judgment October 4, 2018
Before the decision, well below the 4.1% base rate, with no standout signals pointing toward a grant.
Questions presented
The Sixth Amendment requires that a jury, not a judge, find every fact necessary to sentence a defendant to death. In Hurst v. Florida, 136 S. Ct. 616 (2016), this Court held that Florida’s capitalsentencing scheme violated the Sixth Amendment because it gave juries only an advisory role. The Court held that the “distinction” between no jury verdict and an “advisory jury verdict” is “immaterial” because the jury did “not make specific factual findings” and the judge thus did not have “the assistance of a jury’s findings of fact” when sentencing. Notwithstanding Hurst’s holding that an advisory jury verdict is tantamount to no jury verdict at all, the Florida Supreme Court has held that every Hurst error is harmless if the advisory jury recommended death by a 12-0 vote because a “jury unanimously [found] all of the necessary facts for the imposition of a death sentence by virtue of its unanimous recommendation.” The questions presented are:
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Whether a judge-imposed death sentence that violates Hurst is a structural error requiring reversal of the sentence.
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Whether a Hurst violation may automatically be deemed “harmless beyond a reasonable doubt” based solely on the fact that the jury, in an advisory capacity, unanimously recommended a death sentence.
Counsel of record
For petitioner
Elisabeth Susan Theodore
Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer LLP
For respondent
Amitabh Agarwal
Holland & Knight
Proceedings
- Oct 07 2019Petition DENIED. Justice Sotomayor, dissenting from the denial of certiorari: I dissent for the reasons set out in Reynolds v. Florida, 586 U. S. ___ (2018) (Sotomayor, J., dissenting).
- Sep 04 2019DISTRIBUTED for Conference of 10/1/2019.
- Sep 04 2019Reply of petitioner Fred Anderson Jr. filed. (Distributed)
- Aug 15 2019Brief of respondent State of Florida in opposition filed.
- Jun 27 2019Motion to extend the time to file a response is granted and the time is further extended to and including August 15, 2019.
- Jun 25 2019Motion to extend the time to file a response from July 1, 2019 to August 15, 2019, submitted to The Clerk.
- May 16 2019Brief amicus curiae of The Rutherford Institute filed.
- May 16 2019Brief amici curiae of Retired Florida Judges and Jurists filed.
- May 15 2019Brief amici curiae of Florida Center for Capital Representation at FIU College of Law, et al. filed.
- May 10 2019Motion to extend the time to file a response is granted and the time is extended to and including July 1, 2019.
- May 08 2019Motion to extend the time to file a response from May 16, 2019 to July 1, 2019, submitted to The Clerk.
- Apr 15 2019Petition for a writ of certiorari filed. (Response due May 16, 2019)
- Jan 30 2019Application (18A782) granted by Justice Thomas extending the time to file until April 13, 2019.
- Jan 25 2019Application (18A782) to extend the time to file a petition for a writ of certiorari from February 12, 2019 to April 13, 2019, submitted to Justice Thomas.