SCOTUS denies Frank Walls' petition for writ of certiorari

On Tuesday, SCOTUS denied Frank Walls’ petition for writ of certiorari seeking review of the Florida Supreme Court’s decision denying a hearing on his claims of intellectual disability.

On Tuesday, in a batch of Orders denying petitions for writ of certiorari from across the country, the U.S. Supreme Court denied Frank Walls’ petition for writ of certiorari seeking review of the Florida Supreme Court’s February decision in his case.

Walls’ petition presented the following questions:

---

Background of Walls’ Case

Frank Walls was originally sentenced to death in 1988 following a jury’s recommendation for death by a vote of 7-5. On direct appeal, the Florida Supreme Court vacated Walls’ conviction and sentence.

On retrial in 1992, Walls was again convicted and sentenced to death. The jury unanimously recommended a sentence of daeth.¹ On direct appeal, the Florida Supreme Court affirmed Walls’ convictions and sentence of death. His sentence became final in 1995.

In postconviction, Walls raised a claim of intellectual disability (ID) under Atkins v. Virginia.² The claim was denied in state court in 2008 and in federal court in 2011.

Hall v. Florida (2014)

In 2014, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Hall v. Florida, holding that Florida’s bright-line cutoff for determining ID was unconstitutional.³ The conclusion of Hall was as follows:

The death penalty is the gravest sentence our society may impose. Persons facing that most severe sanction must have a fair opportunity to show that the Constitution prohibits their execution. Florida's law contravenes our Nation's commitment to dignity and its duty to teach human decency as the mark of a civilized world. The States are laboratories for experimentation, but those experiments may not deny the basic dignity the Constitution protects.

Walls renewed his ID claim based on Hall. In 2016, the Florida Supreme Court ruled in Walls’ favor, holding that Hall applied retroactively to his case. The Court directed the trial court to hold an evidentiary hearing on Walls’ claim of ID based on Hall.

That decision became final in 2017.

Phillips v. State (2020)

In 2020, before Walls’ evidentiary hearing began, in Phillips v. State, the Florida Supreme Court overturned its decision in Walls’ case from 2016 that Hall applied retroactively to people like Walls. In other words, the Court held that the U.S. Supreme Court’s holding in Hall did not apply to sentences of death that became final before the decision was issued, including Walls’.

We cannot escape the conclusion that this Court in Walls clearly erred in concluding that Hall applies retroactively. We say that based on our review of Hall, our state's judicial precedents regarding retroactivity, and the decisions of federal habeas courts concluding that Hall does not apply retroactively. Based on its incorrect legal analysis, this Court used Hall—which merely created a limited procedural rule for determining intellectual disability that should have had limited practical effect on the administration of the death penalty in our state—to undermine the finality of numerous criminal judgments. As in Poole, “[u]nder these circumstances, it would be unreasonable for us not to recede from [Walls’] erroneous holdings.”⁴

The Court did so on its own; counsel for Walls says “without any notice or briefing by the parties on the question.”⁵

Justice Labarga wrote a strongly worded dissent,:

Yet again, this Court has removed an important safeguard in maintaining the integrity of Florida's death penalty jurisprudence. The result is an increased risk that certain individuals may be executed, even if they are intellectually disabled—a risk that this Court mitigated just three years ago by holding that the decision in Hall v. Florida, 572 U.S. 701, 134 S.Ct. 1986, 188 L.Ed.2d 1007 (2014), is to be retroactively applied. See Walls v. State, 213 So. 3d 340 (Fla. 2016). I strongly dissent to the majority's decision to recede from Walls, and I write to underscore the unraveling of sound legal holdings in this most consequential area of the law.

. . . .

Today's decision potentially deprives certain individuals of consideration of their intellectual disability claims, and it results in an inconsistent handling of these cases among similarly situated individuals.

After Phillips, the State asked the trial court to cancel Walls’ hearing and to summarily deny Walls’ claim. The trial court denied the State’s request. In 2021, the trial court held an evidentiary hearing but ultimately determined that Walls’ claim was barred because Hall did not apply retroactively to his case—i.e., based on the reasoning in Phillips. In the alternative, the trial court determined that Walls didn’t meet the standard for intellectual disability.

Walls appealed to the Florida Supreme Court, which denied his appeal in a decision issued in February 2023. The Court did not address the merits of Walls’ claim but relied on the retroactivity reasoning.

Justice Labarga dissented, referencing his dissent in Phillips.

Walls’ petition at the U.S. Supreme Court sought review of the Florida Supreme Court’s decision. On Tuesday, SCOTUS denied Walls’ petition.

1. Walls v. State, 641 So. 2d 381, 386 (Fla. 1994).

2. For further explanation of Atkins, see this TFDP post.

3. For further explanation of Hall, see this TFDP post.

4. Phillips v. State, 299 So. 3d 1013, 1023 (Fla. 2020) (citation omitted).

5. Note this was after the change in the Court that occurred in 2019 and is similar to how the Court, in Poole v. State, overturned its prior decision in Hurst v. State (2016). For a full explanation of this, see the TFDP five-part series on Hurst, available here.