Florida Just Made it Easier to use the Death Penalty
Florida’s descent into Fascism continues.
An April 14th article from Reuters recently informed us of a bill that has been passed and will almost certainly be signed by Governor Ron DeSantis that would reduce the threshold necessary to inflict the death penalty on a defendant from a unanimous verdict to merely a 2/3 verdict (that is, 8 out of the 12 jurors). This on its own is an absolute travesty, but there’s far more to this story when we take the broader context both in Florida and nationwide into account, so lets get into it.
A BRIEF EXPLANATION OF WHY THE DEATH PENALTY IS TERRIBLE
The death penalty is, as I’m sure you’re aware, a permanent sentence that cannot be reversed. When someone is dead, they are dead. Forever.
Sentencing someone to death is among the most consequential decisions a jury can make, and it cannot be taken lightly. And I would argue it absolutely must not be taken in the event of even a hint of ambiguity in the case. Otherwise, quite a few innocent people will be sentenced along with the dregs of society. In fact, an estimated 4% or 1/25 of death row inmates are most likely innocent. To put that into perspective, almost 2,500 people are on death row right now in the US, which means 100 innocent people are set to be executed.
Now, frankly, I think that even one innocent person being EXECUTED by the state is too many, and so wish to do away with the death penalty all together, but if not that, then at the very least any reasonable person could agree that we should heavily reduce the frequency of it.
Yet there are many unreasonable people who would argue against that. Some may say that the death penalty is more cost-effective, and thus from a consequentialist perspective it makes sense not to waste so much money on housing and feeding certain criminals for life and instead to just get it over with. Now, I’ll start by arguing that by this logic, we shouldn’t even use lethal injection or any other more humane method of killing death row inmates and instead revert back to the firing squad, or, better yet, bludgeoning them to death so as to not waste bullets (as the Khmer Rouge did during their reign of terror).
But beyond that, their argument doesn’t hold up when compared to the actual reality of the death penalty and its associated costs. The modern execution methods we use in the United States are actually MORE wasteful than life in prison. If it’s all about saving money, then supporters of the death penalty should actually oppose it.
Supporters of the death penalty will also claim that it reduces crime. This point also doesn’t hold up under scrutiny.
First, let’s ask a question: If spending the rest of your life behind bars isn’t going to deter you from committing a crime, then would the threat of death do that? As someone who personally enjoys having freedom to live my life on my own terms and pursue what I want to do, I think spending the rest of my life in prison, especially an American prison, is effectively a death sentence mentally and spiritually, if not physically. I think most people are the same. I am not unique in wanting to have control over my life. The vast majority of people seek personal autonomy. I think that the threat of life in prison is a perfectly adequate deterrent without having to resort to the threat of death.
But you don’t need to take it from me. Here’s a short list of other reputable sources:
TheAdvocatesForHumanRights.org
Additionally, John Lamperti, a professor of mathematics at Dartmouth college wrote a paper in 2010 going in depth showing that the death penalty does not deter crime.
Over and over again, the empirical research clearly shows that the death penalty does NOT deter criminals.
And then the last, and in my view, least convincing argument, is a philosophical one. Many would argue that the death penalty is the only form of justice for certain egregious crimes. Ron DeSantis echoed this sentiment in his support for making a death penalty sentence easier to achieve. As that Reuters article pointed out, DeSantis cited the “less than unanimous” verdict by the jury that led to Nikolas Cruz, who killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland in 2018, being given life in prison instead of the death penalty.
Before my rebuttal of this argument, I will say that I don’t agree with retributive justice in general, and consider it at best ethically unsound, at worst actively malicious. However, for the sake of argument, I’ll temporarily drop my opposition to retributive justice and meet my opponents on their own terms.
My response to this argument comes in two parts. The first part is easiest, and refers to a point previously made. Is it justice for 100 innocent people to be executed for a crime they didn’t commit? So long as there is uncertainty in any crime, there will be innocent people punished. That is an inevitability so long as we have the death penalty, and there’s no getting around that. Is worth it to inflict that on innocent people just to inflict the same punishment on people who committed a crime?
As for the second part, the people arguing this seem not to understand how awful American prisons are. The idea that being locked up in a cell for the rest of your life, surrounded by other potentially violent and deadly individuals, given no freedom or luxuries, is somehow a mercy makes no sense to me. And compared to death, well, I think that’s even more evident. The way I see it, if there is no afterlife and death is instead a “dreamless sleep” as Socrates put it in his argument at his trial (or rather, as Plato wrote Socrates’ argument), then does Nikolas Cruz deserve that after all of the pain and suffering he caused? I’d say the answer is no. If retribution is what you’re after, then I’d say spending the rest of your life in prison is certainly far worse than dreamless sleep. But lets say there is a God and an afterlife that we go to when we die, and for the sake of convenience lets say this is indeed the Christian God and Christian Heaven/Hell. If God believes Nikolas Cruz deserves to burn in hell for eternity for his crimes, then he will go there when he dies whether he is executed at 17 or dies of old age in a prison cell at the age of 80. He will die and go to hell eventually, so why should we preserve a policy that also inflicts death on innocent people?
After all that, I really can’t see any reason to keep the death penalty around at all, let alone make it easier. I do however see plenty of reasons to abolish it entirely.
WHERE DOES THIS LEAD?
Now lets get onto the context of this bill’s passage. It happens to coincide with another bill set to be signed into law that would allow the death penalty for any who “commit sexual batteries on children under age 12”.
This doesn’t seem too bad on the surface or on its own terms as a solo bill. Indeed, despite my previously-explained explicit principled opposition to the death penalty, I’m not exactly going to be shedding any tears about the child abusers who get executed. But lets put this into context given the current national discourse spearheaded by the GOP.
Since the beginning of the recent wave of anti-trans panic from conservatives across the country, Republican rhetoric has consistently referred to gender affirming care, social transitioning for young trans people, or even merely allowing one’s child to be trans to all be child abuse. I already wrote in a previous article how the far-right governors and legislatures of certain red states have been instituting draconian laws that have the effect of forcing families with trans children in them to leave, literally the definition of a refugee. The GOP is not being subtle or slow in their pursuit of trans genocide. And then, while actively pushing laws across the country to classify gender affirmation of trans kids as child abuse, or performing in drag in front of kids, or using the bathroom while trans, as child sexual abuse, the Florida GOP has also decided to both institute the death penalty for sexual abuse of kids AND reduce the safeguards that make a death penalty hard to achieve in a trial? It does not take a rocket scientist to see where this is going.
And it need not be only LGBTQ youth and their families who are affected by this. Such a drastic broadening of the death penalty has the potential to be used against any who get prosecuted by the state for certain crimes, including political opponents. Hell, amidst the ongoing Black Lives Matter protests, Florida literally made it legal to run over protestors with your car. DeSantis and the Florida GOP clearly have no problem with making it easier for their political opponents to be killed. They’ve already made the death penalty far easier to achieve in a trial, and expanded the death penalty to be allowed for child sex abusers while simultaneously conflating being LGBTQ in public with child sex abuse. How long until they expand the death penalty to, for example, whistleblowers?
And of course, people who noticed the connection are worried.
Step 1: Call LGBTQ people child abusers
Step 2: Expand the death penalty to child abusers
Step 3: Make the death penalty much easier to achieve in court
Step 4: ?????
When LGBTQ people expressed this fear, conservatives turned around and accused LGBTQ people of “telling on themselves” and of proving the point that the right has been making, that being that LGBTQ people are pedophiles. Even if nothing more comes of this (which I doubt) then the fear expressed will be used to further the blatant dehumanization of step 1, which will continue laying the groundwork for genocide.
And of course, anyone looking at this in good faith should be able to see the flaws in the GOP’s reasoning. If you accuse a certain group of people, we’ll call them group A, of being part of group B as well, and group B is known by everyone to be irredeemably evil, and then you allow the death penalty for group B and make it easier to enact the death penalty, then it is 100% understandable for group A to be worried since you have been constantly associating them with group B. This does not mean group A is necessarily group B. It only means that your association of group A with group B gives you pretext to justify the mass murder of members of group A.
In summary, the many ways in which making the death penalty easier to achieve can be weaponized by the Florida government for their own political purposes, not to mention its potential use in their seemingly inevitable end goal of LGBTQ genocide, is absolutely terrifying. They began with dehumanizing rhetoric toward this particular group, then created conditions that made their lives unlivable in certain states forcing them to flee while also creating bills that would be able to target this group if applied consistently with their previous dehumanizing rhetoric, then claimed that the fear of the connection between this bill and the dehumanizing rhetoric proves that the dehumanizing rhetoric was justified. It should be obvious to anyone where this will lead to in the end.
And discounting that, there is no good argument in favor of keeping the death penalty at all.
Ultimately, nothing good can possibly come from this bill. Florida has been made a far more dangerous place for innocent people of all kinds.
