After not authorizing state executions for three years, DeSantis signed death warrants for the recent executions of four people — two before and two after he declared his candidacy on May 24.
He has also signed two death penalty laws since April, one allowing for executions of convicted child rapists and another letting jurors impose death sentences with less-than-unanimous votes.
“One juror,” DeSantis said, “should not be able to veto a capital sentence.”
Biden’s silence suggests he would rather the death penalty not become a campaign issue. Activists will try to force him to speak about it anyway by lobbying campaign debate moderators to pose questions on capital punishment.
“We’d like Biden to articulate his position and say it out loud,” said Abraham Bonowitz, director of Death Penalty Action.
Bonowitz’s group will also call on Biden to order the demolition of the federal death chamber, a small building on the grounds of a prison in Indiana, as proof that he’s serious about permanently ending federal executions.
According to Gallup, support for the death penalty has fallen from nearly 80% in the mid-1990s to around 55% in recent years. As support waned, it faded as a campaign issue.
Among the last times it featured prominently was in 1988, during George H.W. Bush’s successful race against Michael Dukakis. Bush spotlighted Dukakis’ lifelong opposition to capital punishment. In 1992, Bill Clinton emphasized his support for it in defeating Bush.
Declaring such support has long been a way for politicians to send a broader message — that they’re tough on crime.
Trump has mastered that, said Lee Kovarsky, a death penalty scholar at the University of Texas at Austin.
“So much of his campaign and government style centers on strength and masculinity — to punish without compromise,” he said. “It’s a damaging combination.”
Trump established himself as the most prolific execution president since Grover Cleveland in the 1890s when U.S. executions restarted during his 2020 campaign and continued into the lame duck period after his defeat.
William Barr, Trump’s attorney general, argued in his 2022 book that the executions were legally and morally right. He said they delivered long delayed justice to victims of brutal killings, many of them children.
Trump’s record may have partly inspired DeSantis, said Melanie Kalmanson, a Florida attorney who writes the Tracking Florida’s Death Penalty blog, noting: “It seems that there’s some sort of competition between the two” on capital punishment.
The four Florida executions this year brought the total under DeSantis to six. The most recent on June 15 was of Duane Owen who was convicted in the fatal stabbing of 14-year-old Karen Slattery and the killing of Georgianna Worden, 38.
DeSantis granted a May 22 stay so Owen could undergo mental health exams. Three days later, the day after DeSantis announced his run, he lifted the stay.
The bill lowering the juror-vote requirement to eight made Florida the state with the lowest threshold. He backed the change after jurors failed to reach unanimity to impose a death sentence on Parkland school shooter Nikolas Cruz, who killed 17.
DeSantis hopes the law he signed allowing for capital punishment for the rape of children will invite the U.S. Supreme Court to reverse its 5-4 finding in 2008 that executions for most crimes not involving murder violate prohibitions against “cruel and unusual” punishment.
Despite his full-throated endorsement of capital punishment, DeSantis doesn’t have Trump’s knack for wooing voters who respond to over-the-top, anti-crime rhetoric, Kovarsky said.
“That space is already occupied by Trump,” he said.
As a U.S. senator, Biden enthusiastically supported capital punishment, leading passage of a 1994 crime bill that greatly expanded the number of federal capital crimes.
“We do everything but hang people for jaywalking,” he boasted then.
Only in 2016 did the Democratic Party platform first call for the abolition of capital punishment. Biden made his opposition explicit in 2020.
Many expected Biden to fulfill his campaign pledge within days of his inauguration, perhaps by commuting all federal death sentences to life. He didn’t. And he’s taken no executive action since.
Biden may calculate his continued silence is a prudent strategy because even those frustrated by his inaction wouldn’t dare back Republicans.
“I am not at risk of voting for Donald Trump,” Kovarsky said.
Bonowitz says Biden won’t take action to keep his 2020 promise during the 2024 campaign, because he understands that voters care more about pocketbook issues than capital punishment. But skittishness by candidates worried that speaking against the death penalty will damage them politically is no longer well founded, he added.
“That,” he said, “should also make it safe for politicians to say what they really believe and stand by it.”
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Republished with permission of The Associated Press.
Associated Press
7 comments
Chas
August 6, 2023 at 12:34 pm
I find irony in that so many of the very pro death penalty people, are the very same people that say they do not trust the US Government at all.. Except of course to kill other people.. While they stock up on guns and demand they would never be taken alive by the very Government they don’t trust, except with the power of killing citizens.. Forget it is not conservative as it costs millions more to execute someone than to keep them detained the rest of their life.
Dont Say FLA
August 6, 2023 at 2:23 pm
Chas, above, beat me to it, but I will concur and expound slightly.
No matter how heinous individual crimes may be, and they be pretty damn heinous a lot, there is zero reason to trust a government with the power of putting its own citizens to death for any reason whatsoever.
No government should be empowered to kill its own citizens.
Murder is not representation. The end.
PeterH
August 6, 2023 at 3:12 pm
The death penalty and ‘what if’ VP Harris became president is the Republican Presidential campaign platform for 2024.
They don’t want to talk about the culture wars they’ve created to divide America!
They don’t want to talk about winning their 50 year fight to end a woman’s right to an abortion.
They don’t want to talk about dumping 10% unemployment on the current administration that has delivered 3.5% unemployment….. with the best employment on record for African Americans.
They don’t want to talk about Trump’s fiscal incompetence and institution of trade tariffs that EVERY notable economist predicted would lead to inflation.
They don’t want to talk about the fact that, excluding Texas, nearly every single Republican controlled red state is dependent on blue state subsidies to keep them economically viable.
They don’t want to talk about red state book burnings.
They don’t want to talk about a nationwide lack of teachers especially in Arizona and Florida.
They don’t want to talk about parental responsibility to address the needs of their gay or transgender children.
Jake
August 6, 2023 at 3:33 pm
Desantis is a pro life hypocrite.
Rude Eye
August 7, 2023 at 6:58 pm
Make it harder to get an abortion and at the same time making it easier to impose the death penalty. So what is it Ronny, life or death?
Second term
August 6, 2023 at 10:15 pm
Joe has to wait till his second term to address the United States’ death penalty problem. If Joe did anything during his first term, GOPs like Sloat Thritter Rhonda would cry “Joe is soft on crime” rather than “Joe is decreasing the power of government”
Earl Pitts is a Pedophile
August 7, 2023 at 12:46 pm
Speaking of the death penalty, our resident troll Earl Pitts deserves the gas chamber for what he did.
Comments are closed.