Death penalty.

This letter is in response to the letter asking if The Florida Bar is willing to accept that our process will still execute some innocent people. This is a valid concern. However, in the spirit of the Socratic method, I wish to answer that question with a question: What if an innocent person charged or convicted of murder is more likely to have his or her innocence discovered when the death penalty is involved, leading to an exoneration?

People charged and convicted of capital crimes get the most experienced prosecutors, defense attorneys, judges, and attorney generals working their cases. They get the most attention, publicity, and scrutiny. On appeal, those sentenced to death get their cases sent straight to the seven-justice Supreme Court of Florida rather than a three-judge DCA panel. On appeal they are also expected to argue as many issues as possible as opposed to other appeals where litigants are usually encouraged to limit their cases to the best one, two, or three arguments. See Jones v. Barnes, 463 U.S. 745, 752 (1983), quoting Justice Robert Jackson.

It seems that we have two options: Keep the death penalty and the surrounding safeguards, resulting in more innocents being exonerated but still a risk of a wrongful execution, or abolish the death penalty in which many of the aforementioned safeguards vanish, resulting in more wrongful convictions and life sentences but no wrongful executions.

The risk of any wrongful conviction is a great concern. If an innocent person dies in prison, is it any less an injustice than an innocent person being executed? I fully support additional safeguards to prevent wrongful...