The same jury systems some Republicans think are corrupt can also put innocent people to death.
The same jury systems some Republicans think are corrupt can also put innocent people to death.
W hen a New York jury earlier this month found former president Donald Trump liable for sexually abusing writer E. Jean Carroll, many of his Republican supporters rallied to condemn the judicial process that forced him to cough up a $5 million judgment.
“I think you could convict Donald Trump of kidnapping Lindbergh’s baby,” said Trump lickspittle Senator Lindsey Graham.
“They’re going to do anything they can to keep him from winning,” said Alabama senator Tommy Tuberville, who added that the verdict would make him want to vote for Trump twice. “It ain’t gonna work. . . . People are gonna see through the lines, a New York jury, he had no chance.”
Senator Marco Rubio called both the case and the jury a “joke.”
And of course Trump himself, who now treats lowercase letters with the same contempt he shows to former lovers, took to Truth Social to scream “THIS VERDICT IS A DISGRACE — A CONTINUATION OF THE GREATEST WITCH HUNT OF ALL TIME!”
But for Rubio’s fellow Florida Republicans, it appears their low estimation of jury trials is entirely situational. While GOP elected officials complain that it is too easy for a corrupt jury to railroad a septuagenarian pervert, Florida recently weakened juries that impose the government’s most powerful criminal penalty — the ability to kill U.S. citizens.
Until April, it took a unanimous jury — twelve votes — to condemn a Florida defendant to death. But Governor Ron DeSantis, a newly minted presidential candidate, signed a bill lowering the threshold for death-penalty convictions to only eight juror votes — the lowest threshold of any of the 27 states that impose capital punishment. (The only other state to require less than unanimity is Alabama, where ten jurors can condemn a defendant to death.)
As a result, putting people to death in Florida will now be expedited.
Over the last several decades, Florida hasn’t been afraid to use the death penalty to punish criminals. The Sunshine State has executed 102 people since 1976 and currently holds 318 people on its death row. That’s the second-highest number of death-row inmates in America (behind California) and 119 more than Texas, which has 8 million more residents. You might say that the death penalty in Florida doesn’t appear to be much of a deterrent to crime. Nonetheless, the current standard of a unanimous jury doesn’t seem to deter the state from using the death penalty to punish capital crimes.
The U.S. Supreme Court has already overturned portions of the state’s capital-punishment law no fewer than four times, including in 2016, when state law allowed a judge to override the recommendation of a jury and recommend death. (Back then, Florida required only a simple majority of 7–5 for a jury to hand down the death penalty.)
But the state also leads America in the number of death-row exonerations that have been handed out. The Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC) found 30 cases in which a Florida defendant was exonerated from death row, 29 of which were the result of non-unanimous juries.
The recent push to weaken the execution standard is the result of the tragic 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, in which 14 high-school students and three adults were gunned down and 17 others injured. In 2022, the shooter, Nikolas Cruz, was spared the death penalty by a 9–3 jury vote.
Republican state senator Blaise Ingoglia, the lead sponsor of the bill to lower the jury standard, said, “We all grieve for the families of Parkland and that community. But what that verdict did do was expose a flaw in the current system.”
The “flaw” being due process.
Admittedly, one oversight by death-penalty opponents is failing to sympathize with the feelings of the family members who lose loved ones at the hands of others. It has to be unspeakably painful to have a child or a spouse gunned down by a deranged lunatic.
And, in fairness, the proposed Florida law will still require unanimity for a finding on guilt; the lower standard will apply only to sentencing someone to death after having been adjudicated guilty.
But as they say, hard cases make for bad law. For every case in which guilt is a foregone conclusion, there are many others in which the facts are muddier. And these cases can lead the government to executing innocent people.
In 2021, the DPIC found that 185 death row defendants had been exonerated since executions resumed in the 1970s, meaning one in every eight condemned persons has had the sentence reversed. Nearly 70 percent of the reversals involved some sort of misconduct by police, prosecutors, or some other government official.
To put it in MAGA terms, the same criminal-jury process that many Republicans think unjustly turned January 6 defendants into “political prisoners” can also be unjustly used to end people’s lives. And in Florida, it will be much easier to do so, with no return policy if someone is unjustly executed.
There are those who argue the death penalty is unconstitutional, running afoul of the Eighth Amendment’s “cruel and unusual” standard. But the Fifth Amendment also provides that a citizen cannot be “deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law,” meaning “life” can be taken away after a fair trial.
But the question is: While legal, is the death penalty wise?
And in Florida, specifically, is it desirable to lower the standard for condemnation to a two-thirds majority? It would seem that for Floridians who wanted to keep capital punishment on the books, it would be shrewd to have the highest possible jury standard, because the quickest way for a state to lose the death penalty is for more innocent people to be fast-tracked to the electric chair.
It should also be noted that nationwide, public support for the death penalty is at its lowest level in a half century. According to Gallup, while support for the death penalty peaked at 80 percent in 1994, it has fallen sharply since then, settling at 54 percent in 2021. That’s the lowest number recorded by Gallup since 1970.
But the leader of the national Republican Party, Donald Trump, has recently made government executions a theme of his 2024 comeback tour. Trump has said he would impose the death penalty for drug dealers, openly musing about bringing back firing squads and group executions, and, according to other sources, guillotine executions.
Of course, Trump famously urged the death penalty for the “Central Park Five,” a group of young black and Latino men wrongly convicted of a brutal rape in 1989. He refuses to apologize for taking out a full-page advertisement in the New York Times urging that they be put to death, saying in 2019, “You have people on both sides of that.”
But given Trump’s unapologetic support of the death penalty, it is likely no coincidence that his closest presidential primary challenger, DeSantis, is now seeking to bolster his support for government executions. It appears DeSantis is not content to simply kill off Donald Duck.
Yet those concerned about government abuse should be troubled by the relaxing of the constraints that keep governments from exercising their most serious power: the ability to kill people.