The US saw a rise in executions in 2023 as a result of Florida’s revival of the death penalty, amid Ron DeSantis’s “tough on crime” campaign for the Republican presidential nomination.
DeSantis scheduled six executions this year – the first time the state has judicially killed people since 2019 and the largest number in almost a decade. Florida also handed down five new death sentences this year, more than any other state.
Florida’s sudden return to the death business accounts for the increase in execution numbers nationwide, which rose to 24 in 2023 from 18 in 2022 – a startling reversal of the death penalty’s historical decline across the US.
The flurry of executions given the green light by DeSantis is highlighted in the annual review of capital punishment released on Friday by the authoritative Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC). The report points to a sharp dichotomy that while the ultimate punishment is generally on the wane in the US – this year was the ninth in a row when fewer than 30 prisoners were put to death – there is rising concern about the visceral unfairness of the practice.
In Florida’s case, the number of executions carried out this year raises a disturbing ethical prospect: can the cost of DeSantis’s bid for the White House be counted not only in the millions of dollars spent on the campaign trail, but also in human lives?
This is not the first time that the death penalty has been injected into presidential posturing. Bill Clinton, keen to quash claims that he was soft on crime, memorably quit the campaign trail in 1992 to return to Arkansas, where he was then governor, for the execution of a mentally impaired prisoner, Ricky Ray Rector.
DeSantis has similarly made law and order a central pillar of his challenge to Donald Trump for the Republican nomination. In addition to increasing penalties for drug traffickers, DeSantis has passed two new death penalty laws this year designed to make it easier to send people to death row.
The first allows the death sentence to be meted out in cases of the non-fatal sexual assault of a child – a direct contravention of a 2008 US supreme court ruling that prohibits such penalties.
The other law removes the requirement that juries must be unanimous in imposing a death sentence. Now only eight of the 12 jurors have to agree to send a person to death row.
“Six executions occurred in the same year that Governor DeSantis launched his presidential campaign and the death penalty is part of his tough-on-crime approach. That raises a real concern that the death penalty is being used arbitrarily,” said Robin Maher, the DPIC’s executive director.
Maher added: “Whether someone is executed should not depend on a political campaign – that’s the very definition of arbitrariness.”
Concern about DeSantis’s use of executions as an election tactic is just one element behind a growing sense of unease about the fairness of the death penalty in America. Under the constitution, capital punishment is supposed to be reserved for the most heinous crimes and to be administered consistently across states.
The DPIC report points out that for the first time, more Americans believe that the standard of fairness is not being met. A Gallup poll from November found that 50% said that the way the death penalty was conducted was unfair, compared with 47% fair.
Outpourings of unease about the possibility of innocent or undeserving individuals facing execution has also come from unexpected sources this year. A number of Republican state lawmakers, many of whom are avid supporters of the death penalty, have spoken out in forceful terms.
In the staunchly conservative state of Oklahoma, leading Republicans in the state assembly have lobbied hard to spare the life of Richard Glossip, a death row inmate who protests his innocence in the 1997 murder of a motel owner. Glossip currently has two petitions pending in the supreme court.
Several top Oklahoma Republicans also intervened to try to halt the execution of Phillip Hancock, who was convicted of murdering two men in 2001 which he insisted was an act of self-defense. One Republican lawmaker, JJ Humphreys, even told the state’s clemency board earlier this month that if he had been threatened with being put in a cage as Hancock had been, he would have killed the men too.
The clemency board recommended that Hancock should be shown mercy, though the final decision lay with the Oklahoma governor, Kevin Stitt, who denied it. Hancock was executed by lethal injection on Thursday.
The portrait of the year presented by DPIC’s report continues to be a tale of two countries. On the one hand, the downward trajectory of capital punishment continues, despite the Florida blip.
Only five states executed people this year, with Florida (six executions) and Texas (eight) accounting for almost two-thirds of the total. The others were Alabama (two), Oklahoma (five) and Missouri (four).
But while capital punishment may appear to be withering on the vine, in the rump of states still practicing it there appears to be a fierce determination to cling to the practice even though the results are alarming and barbaric. A prime example was the treatment of the death row prisoner Kenneth Smith in Alabama.
Last year, the state strapped Smith to a gurney for four hours trying to find a vein through which to pump lethal drugs into him. Officials eventually called the effort off, but only after the prisoner had been subjected to what his lawyers say was cruel and unusual punishment, which is illegal under the constitution.
In September, nine months after Smith’s ordeal, the state issued a new death warrant for him. He is now set to be killed in January using an untested and experimental method – nitrogen gas.
