Florida is preparing to execute a 77-year-old man whose own jury didn't unanimously agree on death—and the courts don't seem to care. The case lays bare the constitutional stakes when the state claims the power to end a life, and the thin scrutiny applied when that power is wielded.

Curtis Wilkie Beasley is scheduled to die by lethal injection Tuesday at 6 p.m. for the 1995 hammer killing of 62-year-old Carolyn Monfort in Dundee, Florida. According to Us Weekly, citing the Associated Press, Beasley beat Monfort with a claw hammer 15 to 20 times in her laundry room, then stole her car and lived under a fake name in Alabama until his arrest. He was sentenced to death in 1998.

The crime was brutal. But the constitutional question isn't the crime—it's the process by which the state takes a life.

Beasley's attorneys argued to the Florida Supreme Court that executing a 77-year-old with cognitive decline would constitute cruel and unusual punishment. The court turned down the appeal last week. More significantly, his legal team noted that jurors did not unanimously recommend the death sentence. That non-unanimity used to matter. In 2016, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Florida's death penalty sentencing scheme in Hurst v. Florida, ruling that judges, not juries, were making the ultimate factual determinations required for death. Florida's legislature responded by requiring a 10-2 jury recommendation—still not unanimous. It wasn't until 2023 that Florida finally required unanimity, but that law isn't retroactive.

So a man dies because his sentencing happened before the state conceded that unanimity matters.

Beasley has maintained his innocence, according to court records reviewed by The News-Press. His final appeal now sits before the U.S. Supreme Court.

If carried out, Beasley would be the 16th person executed in Florida this year—the most of any state—and the seventh prisoner over 70 put to death nationwide in 2026, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. He would also be the 29th person executed in the U.S. this year.

Us Weekly framed the case as a straightforward crime story, noting the brutality of the murder and the scheduled execution date. What went unexamined: the non-unanimous jury, the cognitive decline claim, and the broader pattern of a state that has executed more people than any other this year running a system that only recently stopped allowing split juries to send people to their deaths.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the other outlet assigned for this synthesis, offered nothing—its story on an unrelated plea deal was walled off behind a subscription prompt, a fitting metaphor for the institutional press treating capital punishment as a local crime blotter item rather than a question of state power and constitutional limits.

The question isn't whether Beasley's crime was monstrous. It was. The question is whether the state's power to kill is subject to the same constitutional scrutiny the founders demanded—or whether that scrutiny evaporates the moment the public decides someone deserves to die. A non-unanimous jury, a defendant's cognitive decline, and a legal system that only recently stopped allowing split verdicts in death cases: that's the terrain where the state's ultimate power meets its thinnest accountability.

The U.S. Supreme Court has the last word. Whether it uses it will tell Americans plenty about who gets constitutional protection—and who doesn't.