Florida Supreme Court seemingly finds way avoid retroactive application of proper determination of who is exempt from execution under Atkins

As reported in this local article, headlined "Conservative Florida Supreme Court reverses itself again on death penalty legal issue," the top court in Florida authored this lengthy opinion which seems to permit the state to go forward with executing a person who would be exempt from execution under the Supreme Court's Atkins decision prohibiting the execution of the intellectually disabled. Here are the press details:

Harry Franklin Phillips, a convict who shot a Miami parole officer to death in 1982, was hoping to get his death sentence reversed by convincing the courts that he is intellectually disabled. But the Florida Supreme Court, backtracking on its own case decided only years ago, on Thursday ruled that Phillips isn’t ineligible, the court’s latest reversal in how sentences in major cases are meted out.

The court ruled that an earlier decision allowed for the broadening of who can be deemed intellectually disabled — generally someone with an IQ of 70 or less — does not apply “retroactively” to older cases such as Phillips’.  The court ruled 4-1. The only dissenter was Justice Jorge Labarga....

The decision in Phillips’ case drew immediate criticism from opponents of the death penalty, who say the Florida Supreme Court has yet again thumbed its nose at the legal concept of stare decisis, or making decisions drawing from legal precedents. “I am personally shocked at the Court’s audacity and frankly its meanness,” said defense lawyer Stephen Harper, of Florida International University’s Florida Center for Capital Representation. “So many people who were already granted relief by the Florida Supreme Court are now being deprived of that relief by the Florida Supreme Court. “And stare decisis has been abandoned, and this will have a much more devastating effect on the public’s trust in the judicial system.”

Two years ago, the Florida Supreme Court backtracked on allowing certain juveniles — who had been eligible for parole because their murder convictions were from decades ago — to get new sentencing hearings. In January, the Florida Supreme Court reversed itself in ruling that unanimous jury verdicts were not needed to mete out the death penalty, a ruling excoriated by opponents of capital punishment. Florida law, however, still require juries to be unanimous in handing down a death sentence.

In Hall v. Florida, 572 U.S. 701 (2014), the US Supreme Court said that the "old" rule that Florida had used to determine who was ineligible to be executed under Atkins was "invalid under the Constitution’s Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause."  But now the Florida Supreme Court is saying the state does not have to apply the constitutionally proper Atikns rule to "old" cases decided before Hall.  That strikes me as wrong because Atkins is fundamentally a substantive constitutional rule and its proper application should be fully retroactive because it involves "prohibiting a certain category of punishment for a class of defendants because of their status." Montgomery v. Louisiana, 136 S. Ct. 718, 728-29 (2016).  If the Constitution demands a certain approach to determining the applicable "class of defendants" (which is what Hall says), I do not think a state can dodge its retroactive application.

This matter seems sure to end up in federal courts, and it will be interesting to see how it plays out in the years ahead.