Editorial: An outrageous death penalty proposal, even for Florida

Florida Gov. LeRoy Collins’ hands trembled when he could no longer put off signing a death warrant. There would be 29 of them. His secretary said it made her physically ill to type them at first. But she got used to it.

Preparing to leave office, Collins appealed to his last session of the Legislature to abolish the death penalty. He was the first and last governor to do so. The year was 1959. The bill was defeated.

If executions were to end, a House committee report warned, “a recurrence of lynching in certain areas of Florida can certainly be anticipated.”

Perhaps unwittingly, the remark confirmed what the death penalty is about: vengeance.

There is no other reason for Gov. Ron DeSantis and today’s Legislature to be bent on making Florida’s death penalty regime the harshest in the nation.

Outcome preordained

The bill (SB 450) awaiting Senate floor debate this week, with the outcome preordained, would allow a death sentence if as few as eight of 12 jurors recommend it. The current law requires unanimity. Judges who override death recommendations would have to explain why they decided on life without parole instead.

Of the 21 other states still practicing capital punishment, only Alabama allows a non-unanimous recommendation, and even there the minimum is 10 votes for death out of 12. Florida’s new law would be the weakest death penalty standard in the country.

Louisiana once allowed 10 votes for convictions, but the U.S. Supreme Court overturned that in 2020. The majority opinion by Justice Neil Gorsuch attributed the policy to racism, quoting the originators as saying it would “‘ensure that African-American jury service would be meaningless.’”

Non-unanimity would inevitably encourage more racism in Florida’s death sentencing.

Why would eight votes suffice rather than, say, 10 like Alabama?

That owes unmistakably to the 9-3 jury vote that spared the life of Nikolas Cruz, the confessed killer of 14 students and three staff members at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland five years ago. DeSantis, with his eyes on the White House, couldn’t wait to exploit it.

But passing this law can’t bring Cruz’s victims back to life. Nor can it prevent any other mass murders. The people who commit such crimes rarely expect or even intend to be taken alive. Cruz was an exception.

No proof of deterrence

There has never been any proof that capital punishment deters any murders. The people who used to say so for the most part no longer do. Overall, homicide rates in death-penalty states are actually higher than in those that have halted executions, although many variables apply.

The only certainties about SB 450 are that it will cost the taxpayers more money because death cases cost vastly more to try and to exhaust the appeals. A greater risk of executing innocent people awaits Florida because juror votes against death often reveal lingering doubt as to guilt.

Among the many things the Legislature doesn’t know is how many more people might go to Death Row, where there are presently 298. Many have been there three decades or longer. That’s more than any other state except California, where a moratorium exists; the state hasn’t executed anyone since 2006.

In 2017, Florida legislative leaders successfully lobbied the Constitution Revision Commission to defeat a proposal that would have required periodic studies.

Florida is doing nothing to investigate the causes of wrongful convictions despite 30 Death Row exonerations so far or to require all prosecutors to establish conviction review units as only five of the 20 state attorneys have done.

Of those 30 exonerated people, 17 were Black and five were Hispanic. That should tell us something.

So should Florida’s sentencing statistics, which show death sentences were dramatically declining even before 2017, when jury recommendations first had to be unanimous. From a record high 47 in 1991, death sentences were down to 22 in 2000 and 2012 and 15 in 2013. There were only two last year.

DeSantis’ demand for more executions comes as the safeguards against legally murdering innocent people have fallen more deeply into disuse.

No governor has commuted a death sentence since 1983, when Bob Graham signed the last of his six commutations. Where Collins routinely held public clemency hearings for Death Row inmates, there have been none under the last three governors.

A DeSantis Supreme Court

The Florida Supreme Court, which barred non-unanimous death verdicts in 2017, has lurched to the other extreme since DeSantis began appointing justices. It rescinded the 2017 decision and abandoned the policy, in effect since the 1970s, to review each death sentence for proportionality. It rigidly enforces procedural rules that are stacked against successful criminal appeals.

Its as if the governors and the Supreme Court believe the lower courts are infallible when they convict people of capital crimes and send them to death. That is so far from the truth that it’s hard to believe that they really do believe it. More likely, they simply don’t care.

A recent Miami Herald opinion essay raised a serious allegation against DeSantis. The authors, death penalty lawyers Melanie Kalmanson and Maria DeLiberato, noted that both of his recent death warrants have been for men whose juries recommended death by 8-4 votes, before 2017.

“It seems Florida’s government is set on seeking out and executing defendants who were sentenced to death by non-unanimous juries under the state’s prior unconstitutional statute in an apparently political effort to convince the court of public opinion that 8-4 is constitutionally sufficient to support a sentence of death,” they wrote.

We asked the governor’s office to respond to that assertion. He has not replied.

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The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Editorial Page Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Editorial Page Editor Dan Sweeney, and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson. Editorials are the opinion of the Board and written by one of its members or a designee. To contact us, email at letters@sun-sentinel.com.

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