Don’t make it easier to execute people in Florida
The death penalty does not deter other killers.
The murder rate is higher in states with it than those without it. Condemned murderers in Florida spend decades on death row. Life without parole costs taxpayers a lot less. But the death penalty gives politicians a hot-button issue to exploit, as Gov. Ron DeSantis is doing.
DeSantis wants Florida juries to be able once again to recommend death sentences by less than a unanimous vote. He apparently also wants to make juries irrelevant. Judges would be able to condemn people whose lives the juries would spare, a barbaric option presently forbidden by Florida Supreme Court precedent and state law. The proposed return to the bad old days of the death penalty is in Senate Bill 450, introduced by state Sen. Blaise Ingoglia, R-Spring Hill.
Juries could recommend death by a bare supermajority of 8 to 4 instead of the unanimity now required. And even then, a judge could ignore a recommendation of life: “Notwithstanding the recommendation of the jury, the court, after weighing the aggravating and mitigating circumstances, shall enter a sentence of life imprisonment or death …”
Current law allows judges to impose a life sentence if a jury recommends death, but not the opposite. The bill would tilt the scales even more toward death by specifying that mitigating factors must outweigh aggravating factors to justify a life sentence.
Worse than Alabama
SB 450 is a disgrace to Florida. It would make our state more bloodthirsty than Alabama, the only other state that allows death by a non-unanimous verdict, where the supermajority must be 10 to 2.
Florida should repeal capital punishment rather than make it easier to kill innocent people, as non-unanimous verdicts would do. It would also aggravate the historic racial disparity in death sentencing.
Florida holds the disgraceful distinction of leading the U.S. in the number of people — 30 — sentenced to death and subsequently exonerated, stemming from the days when it allowed non-unanimous death sentences by juries.
Experts on the issue say that when a juror votes for life, it often signals misgivings about the person’s guilt. That was a likely reason for a jury vote against the death penalty for Clifford Williams Jr., a Jacksonville man convicted of entering a woman’s bedroom and shooting her from the foot of her bed. Jurors were not told he had a good alibi or that glass fragments showed the fatal shot was fired from outside.
Under the barbaric laws of the time, a hard-line judge overrode the jury recommendation and sentenced Williams to die. He spent four years on death row before the Florida Supreme Court reduced his sentence to life, spared only by only a one-vote margin. He was released in 2019, after nearly 43 years, because a new prosecutor’s conviction review unit documented his innocence.
Williams would be long dead if the current Florida Supreme Court had been in charge in 1980. Since DeSantis packed the court with arch-conservative justices, it has repealed a 50-year-old commitment to review every death sentence for proportionality; rescinded a historic requirement of unanimous death verdicts (still the law unless the Legislature changes it); and made it easier to convict people on circumstantial evidence and to execute intellectually disabled prisoners.
The court is incapable of overseeing Florida’s present machinery of death, let alone the one DeSantis would make much worse.
Parkland as a pretext
The governor’s pretext for this historic change is the 9-3 vote that spared the life of the Parkland school killer. He had pleaded guilty to 17 murders, but prosecutors did not adequately prepare the public for the result that at least one juror would take the murderer’s obvious mental illness into account. The result, life without parole, infuriated many, but it should be by a unanimous vote.
The governor’s crusade is odd because he has presided over fewer executions so far than any of his recent predecessors — two, with another death warrant being appealed. The obvious motivation is his undeclared campaign for president, as he maneuvers to Donald Trump’s right.
Former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo, who flirted with running for president but didn’t, continued to oppose the death penalty long after his political career ended — in part because of his staunch opposition to the death penalty, including three vetoes of proposed death-penalty laws.
“It lowers us all,” Cuomo wrote. “It is a surrender to the worst that is in us; it uses a power — the official power to kill by execution — that has never elevated a society, never brought back a life, never inspired anything but hate. … and it has killed many innocent people.”
That’s the moral compass DeSantis should respect and Florida should follow.
That is what New York has done. In 2004, its high court overturned the death penalty bill Cuomo’s successor had signed. It has not been replaced. New York is the state with a population closest to ours, and its murder rate remains significantly lower than Florida’s.
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.