Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is on pace to set a record that no one should admire and that any Floridian of conscience should regret.

He will finish his second term having carried out 48 executions, the most in Florida since records have been kept, if he continues at his current accelerated rate.

Five executions have occurred since February, with two in May and two set this month — for a total of 14 as governor.

In the previous year and a half there were only two, which gives rise to wonder: Why the sudden rush?

Is it another sign that he’s planning another run for president in 2028? Would he campaign as the governor who tried to empty his state’s death row?

Shrouded in mystery

His press office hasn’t answered questions about whether he intends to keep it up or how he selects which prisoners to execute. About 125 of the 271 inmates on death row are considered vulnerable, having exhausted their first rounds of appeals. But some of the longest-serving inmates still have lingering doubts about the integrity of their convictions.

DeSantis’ predecessor, Rick Scott, put 28 inmates to death, the most by any governor since 1979 when Florida resumed executions after a nationwide hiatus imposed by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The most ever — 35 — occurred under Gov. Spessard Holland during World War II, but he also commuted some death sentences to life in prison, as did every other governor of his time. Bob Graham was the last to do so, in 1983.

During nearly half a century before 1972, Florida governors chose mercy 55 times while carrying out 195 executions, a clemency rate of 22%.

In 1992, Gov. Lawton Chiles considered a commutation for Danny Doyle, a mentally handicapped murderer from Broward, but he couldn’t get enough elected Cabinet members to consent.

They agreed only to postpone the issue for 25 years. Doyle remained on death row that long and longer before the state attorney and a Broward judge quietly agreed in 2023 to resentence him to life with no prospect of parole.

Judges are not infallible

Recent governors act as if they either consider the courts infallible or don’t care about it. They no longer bother to explain why they reject clemency pleas. They don’t hold public hearings, as their predecessors did.

Instead, applications are heard at the inmate’s prison by a panel consisting of a governor’s representative and two members of the Florida Commission on Offender Review. Their meetings and reports are secret. Humans should not be treated that way — no matter what they may have done. There should be nothing secret about it.

Since the Supreme Court allowed executions to resume, Florida has executed 111 death row inmates with only six commutations, all by Graham. He said two of the men he spared might be innocent, that one sentence was inappropriate for the crime and that three were sentenced more harshly than co-defendants who were at least as blameworthy.

Graham exercised clemency to compensate for how courts sometimes get it wrong and refuse to correct its mistakes.

A much wiser Florida Supreme Court once acknowledged the system’s fallibility. In upholding the state’s new death penalty law in 1973, the majority promised to review every death sentence so that “only the most aggravated and unmitigated” crimes would result in executions.

That recognized a moral responsibility to try to balance the scales, but the court no longer tries.

A setback for justice

A conservative court filled with DeSantis appointees renounced proportionality and culpability reviews that were benchmarks for fairness. The majority sees no problem in executing someone whose co-defendant might have been more culpable but was smart enough to cop a deal to elude the death penalty.

The court backtracked on requiring all 12 jurors to agree to a death sentence. That cleared the way for DeSantis and the Legislature to set the death sentence vote to as few as eight out of 12.

That’s worse even than Alabama, the only other non-unanimous state, where the threshold is 10 votes. Alabama, however, has a governor, Kay Ivey, who hasn’t forgotten clemency. In February, she commuted a man’s death sentence to life in prison because of “enough questions about guilt that I cannot move forward with executing him.”

The Florida Conference of Catholic Bishops responds to each DeSantis death warrant with a plea for commutation to life in prison without parole. His office acknowledges receiving the letters but does not reply.

Every murder is heinous, but only some draw the death penalty. No one who understands the process pretends that it’s a deterrent anymore. It is irreparably capricious, arbitrary and error-prone, and that’s a particular concern in Florida, where 30 former death row inmates have been exonerated — more than in any other state.

We hope Florida’s next governor will know better than to assume the courts unfailingly get it right, because they don’t, and an unflinching rush to execution assures that, eventually, an innocent person will die.

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