Death penalty.

Johnny Robinson was executed February 4. I have been an opponent of the death penalty in Florida since 1982. I came late to my activist opposition position, only becoming aware of the issue in November 1982 when Robert Sullivan was executed.

Pope John Paul II, early in his papacy, contacted then Gov. Bob Graham and asked that Sullivan, a lifelong Catholic, be spared. Gov. Graham rejected that plea. Subsequent governors, including Gov. Jeb Bush,

reject all pleas for clemency. It is a perquisite of power that they are able to sign a paper to cause another person's death. Though they have the power, I disagree that they have the authority. All such authority belongs to God, and not to human beings.

Sullivan was very possibly innocent, and the State of Florida, and we the citizens of Florida in whose name such acts are committed, failed to provide due process. He was a student at the University of Miami in 1973. He was a gay man. His alibi was that he was at a party in Homestead and not in Ft. Lauderdale at the time of the killing. His roommate testified that evidence of the killing in their UM dorm room belonged to Sullivan. His attorney refused to...