(NewsNation) — On Monday, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill that would make child rapists eligible for the death penalty, despite a 2008 U.S. Supreme Court decision that banned capital punishment in such cases.

Florida’s death penalty expansion, which makes sexual battery of a person under 12 a capital crime, is scheduled to take effect on Oct. 1.

In Kennedy v. Louisiana, the nation’s highest court found it unconstitutional for states to impose the death penalty in cases “where the victim’s life was not taken.”

Before that decision, six states had laws on the books allowing the death penalty for the rape of a child. Although nobody was executed under those rules, two men in Louisiana had received death sentences for the crime.

In his majority decision, Justice Anthony Kennedy said the ruling applied to “crimes against individual persons” and not punishments for crimes like “treason, espionage, terrorism and drug kingpin activity,” which are “offenses against the State.”

DeSantis’ office said, “the Governor is prepared to take this law all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court to overrule judicial precedents which have unjustly shielded child rapists from the death penalty.”

Some states have laws that allow the death penalty for nonmurder crimes, but they primarily pertain to those specific crimes “against the State,” which the Supreme Court did not address.

Arkansas, California, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and Missouri have state statutes that allow the death penalty for treason, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, though nobody is currently on death row for that crime.

Capital punishment is currently authorized in 27 states, by the federal government and the U.S. military, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Some states, such as Colorado and Virginia, have legislatively abolished the death penalty in recent years.

In other states, where capital punishment is still technically legal, nobody has been executed in decades. Pennsylvania and Oregon both carried out their most recent executions in 1997.

At the federal level, the death penalty can be imposed for nonmurder crimes including espionage, treason and large-scale drug trafficking. Of the 43 people on federal death row today, nobody is convicted of those offenses and all sentences are tied to killings.

Last month, DeSantis signed a bill lowering the state’s threshold for imposing a death sentence, which means juries no longer have to unanimously recommend execution so long as eight out of 12 jurors do so.