Florida Supreme Court justices on Wednesday weighed how much power Florida law gives prosecutors and the governor when it comes to the death penalty.

Orange-Osceola State Attorney Aramis Ayala challenged Gov. Rick Scott after he reassigned 24 of her cases because Ayala announced her office would no longer be seeking the death penalty for any defendant. The announcement was tied to the particularly grisly case of Markeith Loyd, charged with killing his pregnant ex-girlfriend and a police officer, and comes after two years of changes to and questions about Florida's death penalty law.

At oral arguments Wednesday morning, Chief Justice Jorge Labarga wondered how the law could be applied equally across the state's 20 circuits if defendants in one circuit would never face the death penalty while those in the next circuit might.

"How is that proper?" he asked Ayala's attorney, Roy Austin Jr. "Why do we need a Legislature if we have that?"

That's the nature of a system with elected state attorneys for each circuit, Austin said: Each one has the discretion to decide whether to prosecute people for low-level marijuana offenses or bounced checks, for instance.

"Discretion comes in many forms," said Austin of Harris, Wiltshire & Grannis, a veteran prosecutor who served on President Obama's White House Domestic Policy Council. "What State Attorney Ayala did is absolutely an exercise in discretion."

The governor does not have the authority to override prosecutorial discretion without identified malfeasance or misfeasance on the state attorney's part, Austin argued. In 30 years, no governor has interpreted the Florida statute on case reassignment to mean he can take away cases without the state attorney's consent, he added.

Florida Solicitor General Amit Agarwal argued that while prosecutors have discretion to make decisions about sentencing on a case-by-case basis, "across-the-board" decisions are another story.

"Is it really the case that every single elected prosecutor in the state may adopt a blanket policy of refusing to apply or enforce any state law with which that prosecutor personally disagrees as a matter of policy, and that there is nothing that anyone serving in any of the three branches of government can do about it?" he asked.

Justice Barbara Pariente said Ayala did not take a permanent stand against the death penalty or denounce it as inhumane. Instead, Ayala said in March during a news conference, death penalty cases are costly and take years.