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Florida executions still on hold
©Associated Press TALLAHASSEE -- The U.S. Supreme Court refused on Wednesday to overturn the state Supreme Court and allow executions to resume in Florida. State lawyers had asked the nation's high court Tuesday to lift stays of execution granted a day earlier by Florida's court. In effect, the stays issued Monday by a 6-1 vote of the state's justices serve as a moratorium on executions, probably at least through the summer. The justices scheduled oral arguments for Aug. 21 on the constitutional challenge to Florida's death penalty law. Whichever side loses the case in the state Supreme Court is sure to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. The death sentences of the 371 people on Florida's death row could be set aside if lawyers for condemned killers prevail. The issue is who decides, after a capital conviction, which facts are needed to justify a death sentence. Last month, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that death penalty laws in Arizona and four other states violated the Sixth Amendment right to a trial by jury because a judge rather than a jury decided those facts. The nation's high court, however, was silent on the impact of that ruling on similar laws in Florida and three other states where juries play a limited role in a capital sentence and judges make the final decision. Days after the Arizona decision came out, the U.S. Supreme Court lifted the stays of execution it had granted earlier this year to Florida death row inmates Linroy Bottoson and Amos King. The state then scheduled executions for Bottoson and King for this week. But six hours before Bottoson was to die by lethal injection Monday, the Florida Supreme Court gave both men indefinite stays of execution. In his motion to the U.S. Supreme Court, Attorney General Bob Butterworth argued that the Florida Supreme Court had no authority to question the constitutionality of the state's death sentencing law, which has been upheld in past years by the high court. In unsigned orders Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court refused Butterworth's request. Bottoson, 63, was condemned for the 1979 murder of Eatonville postmistress Catherine Alexander, who was robbed, held captive for 83 hours, stabbed 16 times and crushed to death by a car. King, 47, is condemned for the 1977 murder of Natalie Brady, 68, who was raped, stabbed and beaten in her Tarpon Springs home, which was then set afire before King went back to a work-release prison from which he had slipped away.
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From the Times state desk
From the state wire
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