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Thursday, March 28, 2024

Florida man executed by state, UF Law reflect on Hurst case

Last week, for the first time in 19 months, a Florida man who was sentenced to die was killed by the state.

Mark James Asay was executed by lethal injection Thursday at about 6:33 p.m., nearly three decades after he was convicted of killing two men in Jacksonville. Asay was the first white man to be executed in Florida for killing a black man, according to the Miami Herald.

Asay’s execution was first scheduled for March 2016, but was left in limbo along with the executions of the rest of Florida’s death row inmates after Hurst v. Florida, a 2016 U.S. Supreme Court decision. Based in part on a 2002 U.S. Supreme Court case, the Florida court ruled that a jury must decide and unanimously sentence someone to death before the death penalty is carried out, said UF Levin College of Law professor Teresa Reid.

“It basically said that the Florida way of doing things was unconstitutional,” Reid said.

The Florida Supreme Court decided that Hurst’s case would be applied retroactively to cases in which the death sentence was rendered after 2002, Reid said.

Asay was sentenced before the 2002 case referenced in the ruling, so it didn’t apply when Gov. Rick Scott rescheduled Asay’s death sentence last month.

With Asay’s death marking the end of a more than year-and-a-half-long pause in death sentences, legal experts don’t know what will become of other death row cases in Florida.

“(Hurst) definitely slowed the process down,” wrote UF Levin College of Law professor Kenneth Nunn in an email. “The Asay execution indicates that period is over, but there is uncertainty, at least in my mind, as to what comes next.”  

The last person from Alachua County to face the death sentence was Danny Rolling, often referred to as the Gainesville Ripper, in 2006, according to Alligator archives.

Of the 361 inmates currently on death row, two were arrested for accused murders in Alachua County.

Stephen Booker, 63, was originally sentenced in 1977, and Ronald Heath, 56, was originally sentenced in 1990. Both cases took place before the 2002 cutoff that the Hurst case created.

While Reid said Asay’s execution last week won’t necessarily change things for executions in Florida, given that the case isn’t changed by Hurst, she feels it’s given lawyers ample momentum to push against the death penalty in Florida.

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“People who work on these cases believe that the death penalty is immoral,” Reid said. “They will keep chipping away at every aspect.”

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