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Solid case against killer, and capital punishment
Palm Beach Post Editorial

Tuesday, July 01, 2008

Ironically, if the state kills Mark Dean Schwab as scheduled today, the execution will show why Florida should abolish the death penalty.

There is no doubt about Schwab's guilt. In 1991, he targeted, stalked, raped and murdered 11-year-old Junny Rios-Martinez in Brevard County. The crime meets state requirements for capital punishment: first-degree murder, with aggravating circumstances that outweigh mitigating circumstances. If Florida could write a death penalty law just for cases like Schwab's, capital punishment would be a simpler issue.


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But no state, however hard it tries, can tailor the death penalty to fit only those like Schwab and Danny Rolling, who killed six college students in Gainesville 18 years ago and was executed in October 2006. In Florida, as elsewhere, too much about the application of the death penalty remains inconsistent or faulty. That's why Death Row cases, a fraction of the total caseload, take up roughly 50 percent of the Florida Supreme Court's workload. Even as Florida prepares for the first execution since then-Gov. Jeb Bush suspended them in December 2006 because of the controversy over lethal injection, Florida and most of the nation are moving farther away from capital punishment.

In Florida, the rate of death sentences has declined since 1994, when juries began having the option of imposing life without parole instead of execution. In Ohio, The Associated Press reports, prosecutors are seeking the death penalty 50 percent less than before 2005, when that state started allowing life without parole as an option during the trial. Study after study shows that capital punishment is more expensive than lifetime incarceration.

Few governors favored capital punishment more than Mr. Bush But during his two terms in office, Florida killed 21 people - an average of fewer than three a year. That was only three more than the state killed during Lawton Chiles' eight years as governor. There are 388 people on Florida's Death Row.

More important, there are 22 people who aren't on Death Row because the cases against them collapsed. Florida leads the nation in Death Row exonerations, and no jurors want to think that they might have sentenced an innocent person to death. In Florida, what the jury recommends is almost always what the judge hands down.

On Sunday in The Post, the former superintendent at Florida State Prison - who presided over executions - expressed his new opposition to the death penalty. The ex-spokesman for the Texas prison system, who briefed reporters after 219 executions, told the Chicago Tribune last month that Texas uses capital punishment too often.

Few argue any longer that capital punishment is a deterrent. The argument is that it is the proper punishment, given the crime. But given the flawed, needlessly expensive nature of capital punishment, that argument doesn't hold up, either. Florida has pretty much retired Old Sparky, the electrocution chair. Next should come the system of capital punishment itself.