YNW Melly’s Trials Highlight Florida’s Unconstitutional Death Penalty Law
If convicted in a double homicide, Melly could be sentenced to death by a non-unanimous jury — a practice with deep roots in Jim Crow.
This story was produced in partnership with Rolling Stone.
Cortlen Henry pulled his Jeep into Memorial Hospital Miramar and ran into the ER just after 4:30 a.m. on October 26, 2018. In the shotgun seat, Anthony “YNW Sakchaser” Williams lay dead with gunshot wounds to his head and body. In the backseat was Christopher “YNW Juvy” Thomas Jr., also shot dead. Henry said the trio were victims of a drive-by shooting after they left a Fort Lauderdale recording studio. He said he protected himself by ducking toward the Jeep’s floorboard. When he sat up, he said he saw his friends had been shot, and drove to the hospital. The Jeep’s interior was covered in blood, but strangely, Henry’s black hoodie was clean. His T-shirt, however, was soaked in blood.
As police began to investigate, Henry’s story fell apart. When the group left the studio, rapper Jamell “YNW Melly” Demons was riding in the Jeep Compass, sitting behind Henry in the left passenger backseat, in a prime location to kill Sakchaser and Juvy. Data from cell phone towers allegedly also placed Melly in the car at the time of the killings. In February 2019, three months later, Melly, then just 19, was arrested and charged with double first degree murder in Broward County. If convicted, Melly could be sentenced to death.
The double homicide happened as Melly was on the brink of breakout success. His 2017 single “Murder on My Mind” went viral after its music video dropped. A week before the shooting, he wrapped a mini-doc about his life that featured Sakchaser and Juvy, who were his childhood friends. Kendrick Lamar later referenced Melly in his anti-Drake diss track “Euphoria.”
“Yeah Cole and Aubrey know I’m a selfish n—,” Lamar rapped. “I pray they my real friends / If not I’m YNW Melly.”
“I’m a household name,” Melly said of Kendrick’s song. “Just for the wrong shit!!!”
As jury selection for Melly’s trial began in the spring of 2023, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis rescinded Florida’s unanimous jury requirement for executions, lowering the threshold for juries to recommend death sentences from a unanimous vote to eight voices in favor of death — just one above a simple majority and the lowest bar in the nation. A judge ruled that Melly’s case fell under the new rules, forcing him to confront a low standard for execution, all thanks to the new law with shaky constitutional foundations.
Death penalty cases have two parts: a trial for guilt, and if the defendant is convicted, a penalty phase deciding whether the sentencing should be death or life in prison. After losing the 2016 U.S. Supreme Court case Hurst v. Florida — which decided that only juries, not judges, could sentence people to death — the Florida legislature amended its capital sentencing law, requiring a unanimous jury recommendation for a death sentence.
Then came the 2022 trial of Nikolas Cruz, charged capitally with killing 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. After a bitter and contentious courtroom battle, a jury delivered a split decision in his case, thus sparing his life. DeSantis was furious. “I just don’t think anything else is appropriate, except the capital sentence in this case,” he said. DeSantis was also preparing for a fierce Republican primary battle against Donald Trump, a longtime death penalty zealot; at the end of Trump’s first term, his DOJ executed more than one dozen people on federal death row.
DeSantis and the Florida legislature then set about radically reshaping the state’s death penalty system. In April 2023, shortly before the Melly trial began, DeSantis signed a bill ending the unanimous jury requirement in death penalty sentencing. Two weeks later, DeSantis signed a bill broadening the application of the death penalty to sexual assault on children, flying in the face of a 2008 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that explicitly prohibited executions when victims aren’t killed.
The effects of DeSantis’ new system for death sentences in Florida are just now being felt in the state. According to a new analysis by the Death Penalty Policy Project, non-unanimous death sentences — three in Alabama and six in Florida — accounted for more than one-third of the 26 death sentences imposed in 2024, and 16 percent of that year’s executions involved non-unanimous sentences. To start 2025, one out of every seven people facing execution nationwide had been sentenced to death when jurors did not agree on the outcome, including nearly 60 percent of Florida’s death row. And under the new 8-4 standard for the state, the bar is half as high as Alabama, where only two jurors can be overruled by their peers.
“In Florida, we are seeing some of the most aberrant practices,” says Robert Dunham, director of the Death Penalty Policy Project. “The expansion is essentially a return to Jim Crow laws.”
Indeed, non-unanimous juries are often rooted in racism. Louisiana allowing non-unanimous juries to convict began in the late 1800s when white delegates to the state’s Constitutional Convention said they sought to “perpetuate the supremacy of the Anglo-Saxon race in Louisiana.” The state abolished non-unanimous juries in 2018. Two years later, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that, under the Sixth Amendment’s right to a fair trial, a unanimous verdict is required to convict a defendant of a serious crime.
“Though it’s hard to say why these laws persist, their origins are clear,” Justice Neil Gorsuch, a Trump appointee, wrote in the decision. Citing Louisiana’s Constitutional Convention, Gorsuch wrote that “with a careful eye on racial demographics, the convention delegates sculpted a ‘facially race-neutral’ rule permitting 10-to-2 verdicts in order ‘to ensure that African-American juror service would be meaningless.’”
In Oregon, non-unanimous verdicts can be traced to the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. In early 2023, Oregon retroactively vacated the sentences of over 400 people who were convicted by non-unanimous decisions, while Louisiana chose not to retroactively apply the ruling to about 1,500 convicted individuals.
“That’s a vestige of a time when we should all be embarrassed about, but we’re back to it in Florida,” Frank Baumgartner, Richard J. Richardson Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, says of the state allowing non-unanimous juries to put people to death.
The locus of Florida’s death penalty — and its new non-unanimous sentencing regime — is Duval County, a populous part of Northeast Florida where DeSantis was born. It has the largest active death row in Florida, which leads the nation in dubious death convictions (15 percent of all death row exonerations since 1973), and has the third-highest number of total executions among active death rows, behind only Texas and Oklahoma. Duval accounted for 17 percent of Florida’s death sentences between 2006-2016, by far the highest rate of death sentences in the state, according to a 2020 study from the Columbia Human Rights Law Review.
The ACLU is suing the county for racially biased death sentence procedures, supported by expert analysis from Baumgartner and others. The proportion of Black residents to white residents in the county is nearly double the state as a whole, which Baumgartner says is often linked to more widespread use of the death penalty.
Broward County, where YNW Melly is being prosecuted, has nearly identical Black-white demographics as Duval County, and is also a state leader in death sentences. In the summer of 2007, Herman Lindsey, a Black Broward County resident, was sentenced to die for a 1994 killing with an 8-4 jury decision. He maintained his innocence. In 2009, the Supreme Court of Florida found serious errors with his prosecution and trial and acquitted him of the crime.
“When you get put in that situation to actually see for yourself that it is real, that they really railroad you, it’s a different belief as far as what our system is really made of,” Lindsey says. “There is nothing easy about the death penalty except for people being able to receive the death penalty.”
Broward County law enforcement has a long and troubled history clashing with the hip-hop business. In 1990, Broward sheriff’s deputies arrested a record store owner who sold 2 Live Crew’s album As Nasty as They Wanna Be, and members of the group were arrested for performing at a club in Hollywood, Florida.
When Melly’s case was argued in July 2023, the outcome was a mistrial, with nine jurors wanting to convict and three looking to acquit. Since then, the case has been marred by allegations of prosecutorial and investigative misconduct. In October 2023, a judge removed the lead prosecutor from the case for concealing that the investigation’s lead detective said he’d be open to lying to help the case. In late January, Melly’s former girlfriend was arrested and held for 12 days in jail for not testifying during the first trial, in a rare application of Florida statute for civil contempt. She was only released under the provision that she wear an ankle tracker so law enforcement could monitor her location.
The Melly saga proves that while the death penalty has been on a long, historic decline — in 1996, there were 316 new death sentences in the U.S. and just 26 last year — the punishment can thrive when states like Florida change the rules, especially in politically charged environments like the one surrounding the Parkland trial.
“The death penalty has of course always been a political tool,” says Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. Governments primarily use the measure to repress dissent, punish opponents, and to instill fear in the populace, she says. “The new legislative efforts that we’ve seen in Florida, I think, are the work of elected officials who may be trying to curry favor or score points with the governor or the new presidential administration.”
In February, the Republican-dominated Florida legislature passed a collection of bills targeted at enforcing President Trump’s attack on illegal immigration, including another likely unconstitutional law that mandates the death penalty for “unauthorized aliens” who have been convicted of a capital offense. At the end of the month, Florida legislators introduced another bill to expand the death penalty to anyone who engages in sex trafficking.
Following Florida’s lead, Tennessee expanded its death penalty to child sexual assault, and Alabama is poised to do the same after the state’s House passed the measure in February. “Chances are, the state of Alabama will get sued for passing a bill that’s unconstitutional, we’ll spend tons of taxpayer dollars defending it in court,” state Rep. Phillip Ensler, a Democrat, said following the vote.
“The Constitution isn’t really holding these legislatures back from passing these laws, but it is just very political use of what is the harshest punishment,” says Ngozi Ndulue, former death penalty defense attorney and associate professor of law at the University of the District of Columbia. “This undermines the rule of law.”
Nationally, since 1973, at least 200 people have been exonerated from death row, and close to two dozen people are known to have been executed even though details show they were possibly innocent. Florida has the second-largest death row and leads the nation in exonerations. According to Hannah Gorman, director of the Balanced Justice Project out of Florida International University, “when you look at the people who are genuinely at high risk, Florida is the most concerning state.”
A little over a month before the 2023 mistrial, the judge on his case ruled Florida’s change to the non-unanimous sentence of death was only “procedural in nature,” so the lowered standard for execution still is a possibility for Melly. His new trial date is September 10, pushing the prosecution of the Sakchaser and Juvy killings to nearly seven years after they occurred.
All the while Melly’s been incarcerated for over 2,100 days in conditions his lawyers argue “shock the conscience”; they say he hasn’t had a single phone call or visit with his family in over three years and hasn’t had a private meeting with his defense team since March 2022. (The Broward Sheriff’s Office is investigating one member of Melly’s defense team for witness tampering, though they have not formally charged her).
It’s years of pretrial incarceration at the expense of Floridians and closure for their family members who have ongoing wrongful death civil cases against the rapper. A federal judge is considering whether he should be released.
Ironically, the prosecution may be the best thing to happen to Melly’s music career. Since his arrest, “Murder on My Mind” has gone from certified gold to 6x platinum as a single, has over 670 million views on YouTube, and over a billion listens on Spotify.