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Florida conservatives are re-thinking the death penalty


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On June 14, I joined a group of notable conservatives and libertarians to launch a new group, Florida Conservatives Concerned about the Death Penalty. We came together at a press conference in Orlando to express our concerns with Florida’s capital punishment system, including the death penalty’s risk of killing the innocent, its high cost, and a recent court ruling that could set our state on a dangerous and wasteful path.

The courts recently found that as many as 200 Florida death row inmates were unconstitutionally sentenced to die. That means each of these cases will be up for resentencing. Florida prosecutors have the power to decide if they will accept an alternative sentence in these cases and end this protracted legal battle. If death is sought again, it will be much more costly than the alternatives. Therefore, many of us called on prosecutors from across the state to consider accepting life sentences instead of death in these cases and save the state millions. By some estimates, this could potentially save the state of Florida well over 100-million tax dollars – money that could be spent elsewhere improving our communities.

The death penalty’s exorbitant price isn’t simply limited to sentencing trials, as several press conference speakers noted. Every segment of a capital proceeding is more costly than life without parole, which is why more conservatives like me are coming to oppose the death penalty. There are more lawyers to pay, an additional sentencing trial, many more witnesses, and a jury selection process that far exceeds standard selection times. All of these costs quickly add up, creating a large, wasted expense to the taxpayers. According to an older study, the death penalty costs Floridians an extra $51 million a year beyond the cost of life without parole.

Floridians’ return on our investment in this broken system is incredibly poor. While 92 people have been executed in the Sunshine State, at least 27 others have been wrongly convicted, sentenced to die, and later released from death row.

This is a highly troublesome statistic, and most of these erroneous convictions stem from official misconduct, faulty forensics and mistaken eyewitness testimony. Human beings are fallible, every one of us, even when we do have the best intentions to get it right. So long as we have a death penalty run by human beings, there is no end in sight for wrongful convictions and the chance of wrongful executions. It is unacceptable and especially troubling to me that we have allowed the state to convict and execute people using easily manipulable evidence.

As several of us at the launch event pointed out, there are no benefits to such a costly and dangerous system. There’s no credible evidence demonstrating that the death penalty deters homicide. In fact, homicides have dropped in many places where the death penalty has been banned.

The truth is people who commit heinous crimes often do so without considering the possible punishments. The death penalty simply doesn’t deter, but it does frequently harm those who deserve justice – murder victims’ families. Many of them feel that the mandated, complex, and lengthy proceedings and the publicity that goes along with capital cases impedes any sort of healing. The capital punishment process simply takes valuable resources away from the taxpayers and harms murder victims’ loved ones.

The death penalty is a complete failure in Florida, and it is inconsistent with conservatism. That’s why I’m proud to be one of so many conservatives and libertarians who have joined Florida Conservatives Concerned about the Death Penalty. It is important that all Florida citizens urge the end of this counterproductive, unreliable, and expensive death penalty, and we can start by rejecting the death penalty for the hundreds of cases now being kicked back by the courts.

Kelli Huck is a junior accounting and finance student at Flagler College. She is the state chair for Young Americans for Liberty, and she is the Florida Conservative Outreach Specialist for Conservatives Concerned about the Death Penalty, a project of Equal Justice USA.