Julie DelegalAs the Florida Legislature works to repair the state’s unconstitutional death penalty sentencing laws, one murder victim’s mother delivered an unusual message to Tallahassee.
“Put that money somewhere else,” Darlene Farah told lawmakers on Tuesday. In an interview on Wednesday, before she attended another hearing in her daughter’s murder case, she said she spoke to several state senators and senators’ aides during her trip.
Farah, who lives in Jacksonville, says that the $24 million spent on each death penalty case could be put to better use. Her figures come from the Death Penalty Information Center, which averaged the cost of implementing each of Florida’s 44 executions since 1976. That’s when the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment. Much of that money is spent on lengthy appeals.
And it’s those ceaseless appeals that can drag on for decades that Farah wants to avoid. She wants to spare her other two children the turmoil of repeatedly revisiting their sister’s murder case.
“Take that and put it somewhere else. Put it toward something where felons who come out of prison can get jobs. Put it in the juvenile justice system.”
Juvenile justice reform has become increasingly important to Farah as she’s learned more about the childhood of her daughter’s murderer. According to The Florida Times Union, James Xavier Rhodes was born to parents who were addicted to drugs and alcohol, was abandoned by them, and was raised in state foster care where he was physically and sexually abused.
Farah argues that the state helped “create” Rhodes, and that it was no surprise that he got in trouble as a teenager. Rhodes was 21 at the time of Shelby Farah’s murder.
“Common sense tells you he was angry. Why didn’t the state give him the help he needed?” Farah said in an interview with Context Florida last month.
For the past two years, Farah has been asking the state attorney to accept a plea bargain from her daughter’s murderer. The plea offer — life with no parole — came seven months after Shelby’s July, 2013 murder. But the state insists on seeking the death penalty.
While James Xavier Rhodes has not yet been tried for robbing and murdering the 20-year-old cell phone store manager, surveillance cameras caught his brutal acts on tape.
The video evidence makes this a slam-dunk death penalty case for prosecutors. Veteran homicide prosecutor Bernie de la Rionda told the Times Union that while he sympathizes with Farah, the State Attorney’s Office doesn’t permit victims’ families to decide whether to pursue the death penalty.
But in Farah’s manner of thinking, the slam-dunk nature of the case is all the more reason to avoid a lengthy trial, and ceaseless, lengthy appeals.
“It would be done with. Over with,” she has repeatedly told this reporter.
Farah took her message to Tallahassee as the Senate considers whether to take up the House’s fix for death penalty statutes during the regular session. Some observers say that making the death penalty statutes conform to the U.S. Supreme Court’s January ruling will require a special session.
If so, taxpayers can add the cost of conducting a special session to the $1.06 billion that we’ve racked up implementing the death penalty since 1976.
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Julie Delegal, a University of Florida alumna, is a contributor for Folio Weekly, Jacksonville’s alternative weekly, and writes for the family business, Delegal Law Offices. She lives in Jacksonville, Florida. Column courtesy of Context Florida.
