The Florida Supreme Court on Wednesday refused to halt next week’s scheduled execution of convicted murderer David Pittman, rejecting arguments that putting him to death by lethal injection would be unconstitutional because he has an intellectual disability.
Justices, in a 6-1 decision, pointed to past attempts by Pittman to raise the intellectual disability issue and stood behind a key 2020 decision, in a case known as Phillips v. State, related to such arguments. Pittman’s attorneys contended that executing him would violate the U.S. Constitution’s Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
“(This Supreme) Court’s decision to adhere to Phillips does not result in an arbitrary and capricious application of the death penalty,” Wednesday’s opinion shared by Chief Justice Carlos Muniz and Justices Charles Canady, John Couriel, Jamie Grosshans, Renatha Francis and Meredith Sasso said. “We recently rejected a similar Eighth Amendment challenge, noting that developments in the case law did not alter our previously held position that Florida’s death penalty scheme is constitutionally sound.”
Justice Jorge Labarga, who dissented in the Phillips case and in an earlier Pittman appeal, wrote a short dissenting opinion Wednesday.
Gov. Ron DeSantis on Aug. 15 signed a death warrant for Pittman, 63, who was convicted of killing three members of his estranged wife’s family in May 1990 in Polk County. If he is executed Sept. 17, Pittman would be a record 12th inmate put to death by lethal injection this year in Florida.
Pittman was convicted in the murders of his wife’s parents, Clarence and Barbara Knowles, and their 20-year-old daughter, Bonnie. At the time of the murders, another daughter, Marie, was seeking to divorce Pittman, who was opposed to the divorce, according to court documents.
The Knowles’ home in Mulberry also was set on fire.
Typically, inmates’ attorneys appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court if the Florida Supreme Court denies requests to halt executions.
The arguments at the Florida Supreme Court centered, in part, on a 2014 U.S. Supreme Court decision that rejected part of the state’s tests for determining whether defendants have intellectual disabilities. That part of the tests set a cutoff score of 70 on IQ exams. The U.S. Supreme Court said the state could not use such a “rigid rule.”
The Florida Supreme Court in 2016 ruled that the U.S. Supreme Court decision should apply retroactively, which could have given longtime inmates such as Pittman another chance to prove they had intellectual disabilities and should be spared execution.
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But in 2020, the Florida Supreme Court reversed itself and said the U.S. Supreme Court decision should not apply retroactively. The reversal came after longtime Florida Supreme Court justices Barbara Pariente, R. Fred Lewis and Peggy Quince, who were part of a generally liberal bloc, were forced to step down in 2019 because of a mandatory retirement age and the court became more conservative.
In a brief arguing that the execution should be halted, Pittman’s attorneys pointed to tests conducted when he was a child that showed an IQ of 70 or 71. They also said he was in special-education classes and classified as “educable mentally handicapped” in six, seventh and eighth grades.
But the state’s lawyers cited a test at the time of Pittman’s trial that showed an IQ of 95.
The state also argued that the Supreme Court’s 2020 decision rejecting retroactivity should remain in place.
