Florida on Tuesday executed 54-year-old Michael Zack, who was sentenced to death decades ago by a non-unanimous jury under a death penalty statute that has since been found unconstitutional.
Zack was killed as punishment for the 1996 killing of a woman named Ravonne Smith. He was also serving a life sentence for killing Laura Rosillo days prior. He was the sixth person Florida executed this year, several of whom were also sentenced by non-unanimous juries. Zack’s death warrant was signed by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is running for president on a tough-on-crime platform that includes making it easier to execute people.
“Twenty-seven years ago, I was an alcoholic and a drug addict. I did things that have hurt a lot of people — not only the victims and their families and friends, but my own family and friends as well,” Zack said in a final statement. “I have woken up every single day since then filled with remorse and a wish to make my time here on earth mean something more than the worst thing I ever did.”
“I make no excuses. I lay no blame. But how I wish that I could have a second chance, to live out my days in prison and continue to do all I can to make a difference in this world,” Zack said.
Florida is one of just two states that allows non-unanimous juries to recommend death sentences. Two other states allow judges to impose death sentences when juries cannot decide. Florida also has the highest number of exonerations from death row. Although Zack did not claim innocence, he argued up until his death that several mitigating factors should have exempted him from execution.
Zack suffered from fetal alcohol syndrome, the result of his mother drinking heavily throughout her pregnancy. When he was 3, he was hospitalized for drinking about 10 ounces of vodka, his lawyers wrote in a recent court filing. Zack endured extensive physical and sexual abuse from his stepfather, who forced him to perform sex acts, kicked him with spurs, beat him, ran him over with a car, forced him to drink alcohol, injected him with drugs, attempted to drown him and created devices to electrically shock him if he wet the bed, Zack’s lawyers wrote. When he was a child, Zack’s older sister killed their mother with an ax.
Zack endured “unimaginable abuse,” his three sisters wrote in a statement. He “did his best to protect us,” they wrote, “yet we all have enduring scars from the trauma.”
“We are aligned in the belief that he should have remained separated from society, where he would face accountability for his actions and maintain the sobriety he has achieved over the last 27 years,” Zack’s sisters wrote. “Still, our love for him endures. With his execution, our family faces another irrevocable and profound loss.”
As an adult, Zack “was still functioning at the level of a disabled child,” his lawyers wrote. He was unable to cook, measure, select weather-appropriate clothing, follow a bathing routine, follow directions, pass a driver’s test or open a bank account. Before his death, Zack was diagnosed with an intellectual disability.
In 2002, several years after Zack was sentenced to death, the Supreme Court held that executing people with intellectual disabilities violated constitutional protection against cruel and unusual punishment. Zack argued that fetal alcohol syndrome is functionally equivalent to intellectual disability, but courts repeatedly denied him relief, citing Florida’s IQ score cutoff for intellectual disability. Zack pursued clemency in 2014, but his request went unanswered.
Over the past decade, there has been a dizzying series of reforms, followed by reversals, in Florida’s death penalty sentencing laws. In 2016, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down part of Florida’s death penalty system, ruling that it gave jurors an insufficient role in determining the defendant’s punishment. Later that year, Florida lawmakers amended its statute to require at least 10 jurors recommend a death sentence in order for a judge to hand down that punishment. The Florida Supreme Court later struck down that statute and required jury unanimity for death sentences. In 2017, state lawmakers again amended the statute to require unanimous jury decisions.
But in 2020, a newly conservative Florida Supreme Court reinstated the non-unanimous death sentence of a man named Mark Poole, claiming it was “wrong” in 2016 to ban non-unanimous death verdicts.
“The majority returns Florida to its status as an absolute outlier among the jurisdictions in this country that utilize the death penalty,” Justice Jorge Labarga wrote in a dissent. “Further, the majority removes an important safeguard for ensuring that the death penalty is only applied to the most aggravated and least mitigated of murders. In the strongest possible terms, I dissent.”
The 2020 decision cleared the way for lawmakers, encouraged by DeSantis, to again change the law, reducing the number of jurors required to impose a death sentence from 12 to eight. Florida now has the lowest jury threshold of states that use the death penalty.
DeSantis declined Zack’s clemency request in August 2023, nine years after his initial submission, and signed his execution warrant shortly after. Zack and his lawyers were given no notice that the governor was considering his clemency request and had no opportunity to provide updated information.
On Tuesday, hours before the execution, the Supreme Court denied Zack’s requests to stay the execution and consider his claims related to fetal alcohol syndrome, the non-unanimous jury sentence and his clemency process.