Florida Governor Rick Scott has scheduled the execution of Mark James Asay, which, if it turns out, will be the first since a year and a half ago the US Supreme Court. Declared “unconstitutional” the way of deciding the death penalty in this state.
Florida was one of three US states, along with Alabama and Delaware, which did not require a unanimous jury verdict to sentence a death row.
But in March 2016 the high court ruled in a ruling that a judge needs the unanimous recommendation of the jury to impose capital punishment on an inmate.
As a result of that decision and subsequent order of the Supreme Court of Florida, Scott and the Florida Legislature had to make changes to state law.
Some 400 death row inmates were in legal limbo, including Asay, until the Florida Supreme Court last December ordered a review of about 200 of those sentences.
In the review the Court ruled against the appeal presented by Asay, whose execution can therefore be carried out.
Asay was sentenced in 1988 to the death penalty for the double murder of Robert Lee Booker and Robert McDowell.
Since 1976, 92 inmates have been executed in Florida, according to the Florida prison authorities, the last of which was January 7, 2016, the serial killer Oscar Ray Bolin.
Currently, about 400 people, four of them women, wait in the death row for execution by lethal injection.
