A bill that would challenge existing Supreme Court precedent by allowing the death penalty for people who sexually batter young children moved through its first committee in the Florida Senate with a unanimous vote on Monday.
The bill challenges a 2008 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, Kennedy v. Louisiana, that determined the death penalty could not be applied for the rape of a child, saying it was a violation of the Eighth Amendment prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.
Currently, the application of the death penalty for any case other than murder is unconstitutional. But the Florida bill, SB 1342, says that the 2008 case and a 1981 Florida Supreme Court case were “wrongly decided and an egregious infringement of the states’ power to punish the most heinous of crimes.”
