TALLAHASSEE, Fla. – As Florida’s Supreme Court weighs whether the 390 inmates on death row should all be resentenced to life in prison after the state’s death penalty protocol was ruled unconstitutional, a former Florida chief justice who is arguing on the side of giving the inmates life is saying, “I told you so."
Lloyd Duest died in 2011, eight years after Justice Harold Lee Anstead thought his sentence should have been reduced to life in prison. While the three justices said all death row inmates should be resentenced to life in prison, the attorney general said everyone who is on death row should stay there.
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Anstead was the chief Justice of Florida’s Supreme Court from 2002 to 2004. Eighteen months after after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Arizona’s death penalty in what is known as the Ring case, Anstead argued that Ring applied to Florida. Other justices disagreed.
More than a decade later, he was proven right when the high court threw out Florida’s sentencing scheme, citing the Ring decision.
“This decision about Florida’s statute being unconstitutional should have been made many years ago,” Anstead said.
Because the other justices ignored Anstead’s dissent so long ago, he’s now going to two other former Florida Supreme Court justices in arguing that all 390 inmates on death row should now get life sentences.
"This hopefully is setting things right in a large way. Not a small way, in a large way,” Anstead said.
Anstead remains troubled that since his dissent, now proven right, several dozen inmates have been put to death. Gainesville killer Danny Rolling was among them.
"A number of prisoners on death row have been executed in Florida, and arguably, they’ve been put to death under an unconstitutional death penalty scheme,” Anstead said.
Ironically, Duest, who was the the inmate in the case in which Anstead first cited his Ring objections, has died -- not by lethal injection, but by other causes.