Black prosecutor: “[Florida Gov.] Scott said he was only interested in my recusal and refused to have a detailed conversation.”
/THE TOP PROSECUTOR in Orlando, Florida, took to a podium outside the Orange County courthouse last week to outline a new policy: Her office would no longer seek the death penalty in any capital case.
The prosecutor, State Attorney Aramis Ayala, told assembled reporters that seeking the death penalty is “not in the best interests of this community or in the interest of justice.” After considerable research, she said, she had concluded that capital punishment offers no empirical benefits to society: It is not a deterrent, it neither enhances public safety nor protects law enforcement officers from violence, and it costs millions more — in litigation and housing — to kill a defendant than it does to confine them behind bars for life.
And in Florida in particular, she said, the death penalty system has been the “cause of considerable legal chaos, uncertainty, and turmoil.”
Indeed, the U.S. Supreme Court last year found the state’s capital sentencing scheme unconstitutional. Florida’s highest court subsequently concluded that more than 200 of the 381 inmates on death row in the state could be eligible for new sentencing hearings as a result of the Supreme Court ruling.
Even with the system in such disarray, Ayala’s decision to stop seeking the death penalty was bound to be controversial. But the announcement has kicked off a firestorm — especially due to its impact on a high-profile murder case, in which a man named Markeith Loyd is accused of killing his pregnant ex-girlfriend and, perhaps more politically potent, an Orlando police officer.
The controversy sets Ayala, the first black elected state attorney in Florida, who campaigned last year on a promise to reduce racial disparities in the criminal justice system, against Florida’s Republican Gov. Rick Scott, and the knee-jerk “tough-on-crime” politics still prominent in the state.
