A death sentence sought for a Leesburg man accused of child rape could end up challenging a U.S. Supreme Court precedent and perhaps paving the way for such offenders to be executed nationwide.
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State Attorney Bill Gladson, the top prosecutor in the Fifth Judicial Circuit, announced Wednesday the 47-count indictment of Schubert Macarat, 41, on a wide range of sex crimes including a dozen counts of sexual battery of a child under the age of 12.
Gladson has filed notice to seek the death penalty against Macarat under HB 1297, a first-of-its-kind Florida law passed in 2023 that made convicted child rapists with victims under the age of 12 eligible to face the death penalty.
The statute flies in the face of a 2008 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Kennedy v. Louisiana, that barred the death penalty for child rapists in cases where the child wasn’t killed, thus reserving capital punishment for murderers. But it was a narrow 5-4 decision, and the ideological makeup of the top court has changed since then.
At a Wednesday news conference, Gladson said it was time for the Kennedy decision to be challenged — and that the case against Macarat was an “exceptional opportunity” to do it.
Macarat would be the first person since the death penalty was reinstituted in 1976 to face execution for a crime other than murder, experts say. However, prosecutors elsewhere in Florida are also pursuing that distinction, with cases against accused child abusers in Hernando and Putnam counties.
“I think the public would support the death penalty being brought on these types of cases. … I’ve never spoken to anybody that didn’t think that,” Gladson said. “All [Supreme Court] decisions eventually get challenged. This is one of those cases that I think needs to make that challenge.”
Florida leads the nation in executions with seven so far in 2026, making up half of the 14 total executions carried out this year nationwide, according to data from the Death Penalty Information Center, a nonprofit based in Washington, D.C. Florida executed 19 people in 2025, a modern-day record.
Robin Maher, the center’s executive director, said Florida was the first state in the country to enact a law like HB 1297, which passed with bipartisan support in 2023. She said six more states have since followed Florida’s lead in allowing child rapists to be sentenced to death: Tennessee, Idaho, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Alabama and Mississippi. But experts say none has yet handed down such a sentence.
Maher called HB 1297 “facially unconstitutional” in light of the Kennedy decision, which found that applying the death penalty to child rapists violated the Eighth Amendment’s protection against cruel and unusual punishment.
The Florida bill’s text itself even acknowledges this, stating “a sentence of death shall be imposed … notwithstanding existing case law.”
The legislature explicitly rebukes the Kennedy decision in the law, saying it was “wrongly decided and an egregious infringement of the states’ power to punish the most heinous of crimes.”
Maher noted that the only Supreme Court justices from the Kennedy decision who still remain on the court are three conservative justices who opposed that decision, Chief Justice John Roberts, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, who are now joined by three Donald Trump appointees.
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Hannah Gorman, a law professor at Florida International University and an expert on the death penalty, agreed that the Florida law is unconstitutional as it now stands. While the older conservative justices on the court could suggest a “U-turn” on Kennedy, she said, it is also possible the other six justices who haven’t considered the issue before may uphold the decision.
“Unfortunately, with the polarized political swings of Supreme Court appointments at the state and national level,” Gorman said, “we risk the undoing of decades worth of precedence that undermines stare decisis — the certainty of the law and our justice system.”
Macarat was arrested March 22 by sheriff’s deputies after his victim told an adult about the abuse. The victim had managed to record some of the it on her cellphone and deputies also recovered a 4-terabyte external hard drive belonging to Macarat containing about 700 videos of child sexual abuse material, some of which he would show the victim while he assaulted her, Gladson said.
Gladson said the abuse began when the victim was less than 10 and lasted several years, with Macarat sometimes recording the assaults using a GoPro camera.
Macarat’s blacked-out arrest affidavit indicates he lived with the victim during the abuse, and the charges said he was in a position of familial or custodial authority over her. Gladson’s office declined to specify the nature of the relationship between Macarat and the victim.
“This kind of criminal depravity demands only one response from the state,” Gladson said. “We are seeking to prematurely end his life because he has forfeited his right to live among us.”
This is not the first time Gladson’s office attempted to seek the death penalty for child rape charges.
In 2023, the state attorney’s office prosecuted Joseph Giampa, another Leesburg man accused of child sexual battery. Giampa took a plea deal letting him avoid the death penalty and was sentenced to life in prison, as Gladson touted the law’s success in quickly pushing Giampa into the deal.
Now, though, Giampa’s attorney Jason Forman is arguing he took the plea “because of the high-pressure situation involving the threat of the death penalty,” according to court documents. Because of the Kennedy decision, execution was actually “a legal impossibility,” he wrote in challenging the sentence.
Gladson argues that the national consensus has changed on the death penalty and thus warrants the Supreme Court revisiting the Kennedy decision.
Gorman, the legal expert, disagreed.
“The consensus remains,” she said. “Only with more states choosing to abolish the death penalty entirely.”
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