Florida on Thursday executed Donald Dillbeck, 59, who was sentenced to death 32 years ago by a non-unanimous jury under a death penalty statute that has since been found unconstitutional.
Dillbeck, who died as punishment for stabbing a woman named Faye Vann, was the first person to be executed in Florida since 2019.
The timing of the execution appears to be part of a push by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) to impose the death penalty by non-unanimous juries. DeSantis, who is expected to run for president, signed Dillbeck’s death warrant last month on the same day he floated changing state law to allow non-unanimous juries to impose death sentences. “Maybe eight out of 12 have to agree or something,” DeSantis recommended at the Florida Sheriffs Association conference, before ordering the execution of a person with a split jury fit.
“I know I hurt people when I was younger. I’m really messed up,” Dillbeck reported he said before he died. “But I know Ron DeSantis has done worse. He took a lot from the crowd. I speak for all men, women and children. He has put his foot around our necks. Ron DeSantis and others like him can sk ds us.
In written statement, Vann’s children, Tony and Laura Vann, thanked DeSantis for carrying out the execution. However, the execution provides closure,” he wrote.
Shortly after the DeSantis jury recommendation, Republican lawmakers filed a set of bills that would replace the unanimous jury requirement with an 8-4 threshold and allow judges to overrule juries to impose the death penalty.
“I’m not minimizing anything [Dillbeck] for people,” Florida capital defender Allison Miller told the Tallahassee Democrat, “but he’s always a political pawn.”
DeSantis already quoted The result of the trial for Nikolas Cruz, who killed 17 people in the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Florida, is the reason for bringing back the non-unanimous jury verdict. Cruz is there sentenced to life in prison without parole after jurors split 9-3 over the death penalty. Not all victims of the Parkland shooting wanted Cruz to be sentenced to death.
There is currently no state in the country where a jury can impose the death penalty by an 8-4 vote, according to Robert Dunham, former executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. Alabama is the only state that currently allows non-unanimous juries to sentence people to death — and requires 10 votes for death. Missouri and Indiana allow judges to impose the death penalty in cases where juries are divided.
Like most people on death row, Dillbeck suffered severe torture as a child. His birth mother drank 18-24 beers a day during pregnancy, causing “catastrophic effects on Mr. Dillbeck’s intellectual and adaptive functioning,” the attorneys wrote in a request asking the Supreme Court to review his case. “That Mr. Dillbeck suffers from Neurobehavioral Disorder Associated with Prenatal Alcohol Exposure (ND-PAE) has been medically documented, indisputable, and factually indisputable,” the attorneys continued.
Supreme Court rule in 2002 that punishes people with intellectual disabilities violates the constitutional protection against cruel and unusual punishment. In the petition, Dillbeck’s attorney argued that ND-PAE is “functionally similar” and “identical in etiology and symptoms” to intellectual disability and should exempt him from execution.
Dillbeck was placed in foster care at age 4 and began using drugs at age 13, the Tampa Bay Times reported. When he was 15, he was sentenced to death in prison for fatally shooting Lee County sheriff’s deputy Dwight Lynn Hall after the officer caught the boy in a stolen car. The teenager was repeatedly sexually assaulted in prison. In 1990, he escapes from an off-site vocational program, buys a knife, and meets Vann in his car in the parking lot. When he refuses to let her go, he stabs her.
In 1991, Dillbeck was sentenced to death by a jury with eight voting for death and four against. At that time, the jury can recommend the death penalty by a simple majority.
“As the clerk read the sentence aloud, one juror sobbed uncontrollably,” the Tallahassee Democrat said, citing the newspaper’s archives. “Readers write to the newspaper that they are disturbed by the fact that an arbitrary division can still send people to die, or how Dillbeck’s history of childhood trauma seems to offer some, but not enough, grace.”
In 2016, US Supreme Court struck down part of Florida’s death penalty system, rules that do not give jurors enough role in determining the defendant’s surrender. Later that year, the the state legislature amends the statute to require at least 10 jurors to recommend the death penalty for a judge to impose a sentence. Florida Supreme Court then it was done which is unconstitutional for the judge to impose the death sentence with non-unanimous jury recommendations. In March 2017, state lawmakers are revising the death penalty law again to require a unanimous jury decision.
But in 2020, the Florida Supreme Court made a stunning reversal. At that time, three of the liberal and moderate judges had reached the mandatory retirement age of 75. The majority of the court reinstated the non-unanimous death sentence of a man named Mark Poole, finding, “Our court was wrong” in 2016. Decision 2020 meet that’s just the jury’s decision about what the individual is eligible for the death penalty must be unanimous – not a real decision to impose punishment.
“The majority returns Florida to the status of an absolute outlier among jurisdictions in this country that use the death penalty,” Justice Jorge Labarga write in dissent. “Furthermore, the majority removes important protections to ensure that the death penalty applies only to the most serious and least mitigating murders. In the strongest terms, I disagree.