Did Fla. sentence wrong man to death ... for the 30th time?

The state of Florida is set to execute an Air Force veteran many people believe is innocent.

Gov. Ron DeSantis has signed the death warrant. But advocates are scurrying to save 73-year-old James Dailey, noting he was convicted on circumstantial evidence and suspect testimony from jailhouse snitches.

Dailey will either be Florida’s 100th execution since 1976 — or the state’s 30th exoneration. Think about that for a moment. For every 10 times this state has executed someone, we learned that three more people were wrongly sentenced to die.

Florida has more overturned death sentences than any state in America.

The reality is that juries sometimes get it wrong, making mistakes that haunt them for the rest of their lives. I spoke with one former foreman who talked about his own gut-wrenching mistake. More on that in a moment.

But first you need to understand something: Very few states execute people anymore.

In fact, Florida is one of only six states in America to carry out executions this year. Only eight did so last year.

Basically, when it comes to government-ordered killing, Florida has more in common with the Middle East than middle America.

There are plenty of reasons civilized nations and states have stopped executing people.

For starters, the death penalty isn’t equally applied. The poor, the mentally ill, blacks and men are more likely to be sentenced to death. Also, capital punishment does not deter murder.

Of the six states to execute people this year — Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Missouri, Tennessee, Texas — five have above-average murder rates. Three are in the top 10.

People don’t commit murder because they’ve checked into a state’s sentencing guidelines. They do so because they’re enraged. Or mad. Or indifferent to both human life and consequences.

So we’re not executing people to make our state safer. We do so out of vengeance. And we often get it wrong.

It’s also more costly to try to kill an inmate than to lock them up for life.

That’s why a growing number of fiscal conservatives oppose capital punishment. Groups like Conservatives Concerned about the Death Penalty know studies consistently show virtually every stage of a capital case is more expensive — from hiring capital-level defense teams and courtroom experts to a lengthier jury selection and appeals process.

When people hear about the delays, some say: Well, we should just deny all those silly appeals and kill them faster.

OK, well which of the 29 people Florida later cleared of murder charges would you have more quickly killed?

Well, let’s just kill the ones we’re sure are guilty.

Which ones are those? The prosecutors in every capital case said he or she was sure the defendant deserved to die … including the 29 Florida cases later overturned.

The most recent one was in our own backyard.

The double-murder case against Clemente Javier Aguirre-Jarquin in Seminole County sounded solid at the time.

And jury foreman Mike Powell had few qualms about sentencing the Honduran man to death in 2006 … until he learned the true story.

The fingerprint evidence he’d heard was wrong. Later, someone else confessed to the crimes … five different times.

“I learned things just weren’t as clear as they seemed at the time,” Powell said in a phone interview from his new home in Washington. “When I learned the truth, I was like ‘Oh my God.’ I just never felt good about it.”

The Florida Supreme Court overturned Aguirre-Jarquin’s case, saying the new evidence made him look more like a “scapegoat” than a criminal.

Powell said the experience changed his perspective. “I just don’t believe that the state should be in the position to murder,” he said. “And it is killing someone.”

In Dailey’s case, the Innocence Project and his lawyers note that someone else has already been convicted for the brutal 1985 killing of 14-year-old Shelly Boggio in Indian Rocks Beach — and that his codefendant, a career criminal who once implicated Dailey, changed his testimony.

Dailey’s alleged confession came from jailhouse snitches who received “consideration in their own cases” after a detective tried to get 15 other inmates to implicate Dailey, his legal team said in a statement.

There was no eyewitness, no DNA evidence and no other physical evidence connecting Dailey to the murder.

Dailey was supposed to be executed in two weeks, but a federal judge granted a stay last week until the end of the year.

Certainly there are some vile and irredeemable people we know committed crimes. Some even legitimately confess. Locking them up forever is a fitting punishment — one that’s cheaper and won’t run the risk of killing the wrong person.

Take it from Powell, the former foreman who penned a guest column in the Sentinel last week, urging DeSantis to reconsider Dailey’s death warrant.

Wrote Powell: “Like the governor, I once held a man’s life in my hands. I know how it feels to be sure someone did the crime. I know how it feels to hear about a terrible crime and believe whoever did it deserved a death sentence.

“And now, for the rest of my life, I will also know just how wrong a person, a group of people, and an entire criminal justice system can be. Gov. DeSantis should walk humbly to avoid this burden.”

And Florida should reconsider its zeal for killing in general — a zeal possessed by very few other states in modern times.