Let Florida’s death penalty die

Some Florida lawmakers are determined to keep the state’s death penalty alive. Here’s hoping they fail. Even if they succeed, the process is about to get more controversial and generate more costly lawsuits.

Sadly, our legislators lack the courage to end capital punishment, a move already taken in 32 states. As a result, executions are down nationally, with only five last year. But Florida politicians love to get in front of microphones and say they are tough on crime and so support the death penalty.

So today, a Senate committee is scheduled take up SB 280, filed by Criminal Justice Committee Chairman Randolph Bracy, D-Orlando, which would require a 12-member jury be unanimous in sentencing someone to death. As previously written, only 10 jurors had to agree.

Florida’s death penalty has been on sabbatical for about a year, ever since the U.S. Supreme Court found the sentencing law unconstitutional because it gave too much power to judges, rather than juries.

The Legislature, in a hurry to restore the death business, quickly adopted a rewrite that was quickly struck down by the Florida Supreme Court because it did not require the jury to be unanimous in sentencing someone to death.

So lawmakers are going back for a third time, this time with a bill that would require a unanimous jury recommendation.

But there is still a problem in Florida, which leads the nation in the number of death sentences overturned, with 26. To be clear, in sentencing someone to death, that means the state has gotten it wrong 26 times.

According to the News Service of Florida, the state no longer has a supply of midazolam hydrochloride, the drug used to sedate prisoners before they are given other paralyzing, then killing, drugs. For public relations purposes, drug companies have stopped selling such drugs to states that plan to use them to kill people.

While no one is quite sure what drugs the state now plans to use, the Department of Corrections has reportedly stockpiled three likely options. The state has never previously used these three drugs in executions. Neither has the new drug combination been used by any other state.

What effect the new mixture would have — and whether they could illegally cause unusual pain and suffering — isn’t known. But you can count on lawsuits galore before they are rolled out.

“There’s obviously concern that Florida continues to experiment with lethal injection, using drugs that haven’t been used before,” we were told by Maria DeLiberato, a Tampa-area attorney with Capital Collateral Regional Counsel, which represents indigent prisoners on Death Row.

There’s also some question about whether the Legislature will address whether juries must unanimously decide that aggravating factors outweigh mitigating circumstances in death penalty cases. The U.S. Supreme Court did not address that issue when it found Florida’s death penalty law unconstitutional.

Perhaps things are different in more conservative North Florida, but in South Florida, we’ve heard no complaints about the death penalty’s hiatus. Neither do we see a need for urgency in rewriting a bill sure to cause more confusion and costly lawsuits.

In fact, we see no urgency to resurrect the death penalty law at all.

“It’s all politics,” Broward Public Defender Howard Finkelstein told us. “(Politicians) don’t care about the person. They just want to come to the microphone and say, ‘We kill people in Florida.’ ”

Ideally, Florida lawmakers would abolish the death penalty and settle for a sentence worse than death: life without hope of parole. Not only would such a sentence ensure justice and prevent the state from killing the wrong person, it would save the state tens of millions of dollars a year now spent to support the death penalty process.

If they don’t have the guts to do that, they should at least let someone else take the lead in developing a deadly new drug combination, which is sure to be challenged in court.

Around the country, more and more states have come to understand that the death penalty doesn’t make sense, morally or economically. Some day, hopefully, Florida will come to that realization. Let it please be soon.