The Florida Supreme Court [official website] issued a one-paragraph order Wednesday informing judges and prosecutors that the state’s death penalty procedure is unconstitutional, marking the second such order in three months. Attorney General Pam Bondi [official website] argued that, although the court ruled the statute unconstitutional in October [JURIST report], prosecutors should be able to apply the death penalty to pending trails so long as the jury voted unanimously. Wednesday’s 5-2 ruling concluded that, counter to Bondi’s argument, the unconstitutionality of the death penalty will universally prevent it from being applicable to all pending prosecution. At 1 PM ET on Wednesday afternoon, the court removed the order from its website due to a “clerical error,” according to a court spokesman. The spokesman did not indicate if or when the order would be reissued.

Capital punishment [JURIST op-ed] remains a controversial issue in the US and worldwide. In October the US Supreme Court vacated [JURIST report] the death sentence of an Oklahoma man convicted of killing his girlfriend and her two children in a case where the trial judge permitted family members to recommend the sentence to the jury. Also in October, a group of UN human rights experts spoke on the subject of the death penalty and terrorism, calling the death penalty ineffective [JURIST report], and often times illegal, in deterring to terrorism. In September, four UN human rights experts and Human Rights Watch (HRW) [advocacy website] called on Pakistan to halt the execution of Imdad Ali [JURIST reports], a mentally disabled man that was convicted of murder in 2001. The experts called Imdad Ali’s execution “unlawful and tantamount to an arbitrary execution, as well as a form of cruel, inhuman or degrading punishment,” and called for it to be annulled. Also in September in Oklahoma, after a botched execution in 2014 and numerous drug mix-ups in 2015, Attorney General Scott Pruitt refused [JURIST report] to set execution dates until new protocols have been approved. In May the Supreme Court upheld a stay [JURIST report] of execution for Alabama inmate Vernon Madison. A few days before that a Miami judge ruled [JURIST report] that Florida’s revamped death penalty law is unconstitutional because it does not require a unanimous agreement among jurors to approve executions. In April Virginia’s General Assembly voted [JURIST report] to keep secret the identities of suppliers of lethal injection drugs.