Florida’s death penalty will again return to the Supreme Court, this time in a case testing a jury’s responsibility for determining whether a defendant is intellectually disabled.
Without comment, the court announced Monday it would hear the challenge brought by Florida inmate Timothy L. Hurst. The case will be heard in the term that starts in October.
Hurst was convicted in 2000 for the murder of Cynthia Lee Harrison, a manager at a Popeye’s Fried Chicken restaurant in Escambia County. Harrison’s body was found in the restaurant’s freezer and, according to the state’s brief, she had been “bound, gagged and stabbed multiple times.”
Hurst, according to his defense attorneys, is intellectually disabled and therefore ineligible for the death penalty.
Hurst’s mother was 15 years old when she gave birth, and she testified that she drank all day throughout her pregnancy. She said her son was “slow, very slow” while growing up, and he reportedly struggled with everyday activities. A brain scan showed serious abnormalities, and one test recorded his IQ at 69.
Defense attorneys presented the intellectual disability evidence during the penalty phase of the trial, as mitigation, but the Florida Supreme Court ruled the jury did not have to make a determination of whether Hurst was, in fact, intellectually disabled and thus ineligible for execution.
“The jury,” Hurst’s defense attorneys argued in their petition urging the Supreme Court to take the case, “must find those facts essential to determine whether a defendant should live or die.”
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