USA - Florida. The Florida Supreme Court has unanimously vacated the death sentence of Humberto Delgado

The Florida Supreme Court has unanimously vacated the death sentence of Humberto Delgado, who was convicted in the 2009 killing of Tampa police Corporal Mike Roberts. The court ruled that Delgado's extreme mental illness at the time of the crime made a death sentence disproportionate to the severity of the crime. The court ordered the case back to the circuit court for Delgado to be resentenced to life in prison. Delgado, 40, was convicted of 1st-degree murder in 2012 in Roberts' death. The Tampa police corporal encountered Delgado on Aug. 19, 2009, as Delgado pushed a shopping cart full of guns down Nebraska Avenue. He fought the officer, shooting him once before running away. At his trial, doctors testified about Delgado's history of delusions and psychotic behavior. All diagnosed him with bipolar disorder. Their examinations revealed that in his early adulthood, Delgado was plagued by the beliefs that police were out to kill him and that people were following him and sitting in trees outside his home. He was known to wander the streets at night, saying that demons, the Masons, and the rapper 50 Cent were trying to kill him. On the day he shot Roberts, Delgado had walked nearly 15 miles from his uncle's home in Oldsmar, en route to a veterans hospital in Tampa. Roberts saw him with the cart in an area that had seen a rash of shopping cart thefts by homeless people. Delgado gave Roberts his identification card. When Roberts started to search Delgado's belongings, he tried to run. Roberts shocked Delgado with a Taser. Delgado then hit Roberts several times before drawing a gun and shooting him. He ran to a local park, where officers soon found him hiding behind a wood pile and arrested him. In its opinion, the supreme court noted that the death penalty is meant for cases in which the aggravating factors greatly outweigh any mitigating factors presented by the defense. In Delgado's case, substantial weight was given to his impaired mental state at the time of the crime. "We do not downplay the fact that Corporal Roberts lost his life as a result of Delgado's actions," the justices wrote. "However ... we are compelled to reduce Delgado's sentence to life imprisonment because death is not a proportionate penalty when compared to other cases." (See also February 10, 2012).