The Political Violence of Ron DeSantis

January 29, 2023

NYT ad by Trump in 1989

A story published by Rolling Stone last week detailed the 13 executions by the Trump administration, six during the tail of the former president’s tenure when he had already lost the election. Trump, who famously called for the execution of innocent teenagers in 1989, has, shall we say, a checkered notion of “law and order.” The story goes beyond Trump, however, and explains how a number of people, including Department of Justice and Bureau of Prisons officials, enabled Trump’s killing spree. Even as rioters scaled the walls of Congress and news organizations watched in horror, people in the government, including the White House, the U.S. Supreme Court, and the Department of Justice, allowed three more people to be executed by a president facing impeachment and accused of attempting to subvert the peaceful transition of power via an armed coup. The quote from the lawyer for Lisa Montgomery haunts me. She told Rolling Stone:

These inmates were being exterminated by the Trump administration, which was being assisted by the courts in doing it…If there’s a word to describe it, I’d say it was lawless. The administration just didn’t care. And when you see the government flex its power that way — with a cold, callous machinery of death that occurred in Lisa’s case — it’s truly appalling.

The system kills by design — often slowly and occasionally, quickly.

And the blood-lust continues. In his November 2022 speech announcing his 2024 campaign, Donald Trump promised more executions if he wins: “We’re going to be asking [for] everyone who sells drugs, gets caught selling drugs to receive the death penalty for their heinous acts. Because it is the only way.”

Not to be outdone, last week Florida Governor Ron DeSantis spoke briefly at the Florida Sheriffs Association winter conference on January 24. There, he announced that he wanted to eliminate the requirement of a unanimous jury to impose a death sentence, largely because he was disappointed at the life-without-parole sentence a jury gave Nikolas Cruz, who killed 17 people in 2018 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. (Three jurors out of 12 would not agree to the death penalty in this case, so bear in mind that DeSantis is wrong on the facts below).     

If you will never administer the punishment, you just can’t be on the jury. Our law authorizes it. But you’re in a situation where you have 12 jurors, and just one juror vetoes it, then you end up not getting the sentence. And so I think you had an 11 to one decision, where the 11 said he [Cruz] should get capital punishment. One said no. And we don’t know what went into that. But I do think there are people who get on these juries who never intend to administer capital punishment…Bottom line is this probably can be changed by statute. And it’s one thing to say, yeah, obviously a majority of the jury has to, maybe a supermajority. But that one person, being able to veto that?...Fine, have a supermajority. But you can’t just say one person. So maybe eight out of 12 have to agree? Or something. But we can’t be in a situation where one person can just derail this.

It’s not a coincidence DeSantis chose Florida’s sheriffs as the eager audience for his macabre plan. In late January, the sheriff of Santa Rosa County, Florida, Bob Johnson, gleefully expressed how glad he was that a man accused of kidnapping his girlfriend was indicted in federal court. (The accused allegedly kidnapped the victim in Florida, where she lived, and drove her to Alabama, which is why the case is a federal one.)

“This guy is either going to spend the rest of his life in prison or get the death penalty, which either one is well-deserved,” the sheriff told a local news source. He went on. “I would have preferred to have it occur in Santa Rosa County and have him go through our court system but because of several things I can’t really discuss, that’s not going to happen.” (Note that the FBI and federal prosecutors have not yet charged the accused with murder nor is it clear a homicide took place.)

Two days after talking to the sheriffs about executing people, DeSantis signed the death warrant for Donald David Dillbeck. Dillbeck was sentenced in 1979 to life in prison for shooting a Lee County sheriff’s deputy. Dillbeck was 15 at the time of the shooting. In 1990 (when he was 25), Dillbeck escaped from a work program and was convicted of stabbing a woman in Tallahassee and stealing her car. He crashed the car and cops arrested him. He was sentenced to death. Sheriff Carmine Marceno – known for cosplaying as a soldier for TikTok –  said, “The death penalty fits.”

DeSantis told a different police group a few days later that he also wanted to reinstate the death penalty for certain sex crimes against children.

He confirmed these unconstitutional ideas with a cheerfully-produced graphic.

Florida’s death penalty apparatus is f*cked up beyond all recognition. In Florida until 2016, death sentences were established in the penalty phase via a jury and judge. A jury gave a “recommendation” (via a simple majority vote) that a judge could confirm. In 2016, the U.S. Supreme Court held that “a simple majority” was unconstitutionally insufficient to send someone to death. The Florida legislature passed a law requiring a 10-2 verdict for execution. But in 2017, the Florida Supreme Court went further, holding that a unanimous jury was required for death sentences. The legislature followed suit by changing the law accordingly.

But there is a twist. Three years later, DeSantis replaced three justices on the state supreme court with more conservative ones, and in 2020 the Florida Supreme Court held that its own 2016 ruling went, as they say, “too far,” and backtracked. In that case, State v. Poole, the jury voted 11-1 to execute the defendant. The court issued an unsigned opinion saying the 2017 holding was wrong – OOPS – and opened the door for the legislature to change the law again.

From the dissent in Poole:

Today, a majority of this Court recedes from the requirement that Florida juries unanimously recommend that a defendant be sentenced to death. In doing so, the majority returns Florida to its status as an absolute outlier among the jurisdictions in this country that utilize the death penalty. The majority gives the green light to return to a practice that is not only inconsistent with laws of all but one of the twenty-nine states that retain the death penalty, but inconsistent with the law governing the federal death penalty.

I am not sure what that means for DeSantis’s good ideas. One can hardly count on the current U.S. Supreme Court to prevent the starry machinery of death from grinding on.

DeSantis has gotten, rightfully, called out in the press for his racist interpretations of history and decisions to outlaw African-American studies and warp history to his white man liking. Yet, the online discourse prioritizes this decision and debates what the “outcome” will be. Does it matter what history people learn in Florida, some online people seem to ask?

Of course it does.  But let’s be clear that first there have to be people around to learn history. DeSantis is committing violence. Political violence. He is thwarting democracy and civil society and morality and all that is good in the world.  He is also using violence to suppress dissent.

On Friday, I did a Twitter spaces chat about far-right sheriffs and someone asked about the threat of “political violence.” I think when people say “political violence,” they imagine the mob on January 6. But Trump and DeSantis’ more mundane views on the death penalty are political violence, and infinitely more effective. Every execution, every killing at the hands of police, every individual awaiting trial who dies in jail – these are all examples of political violence. It may come cloaked in suits and robes, dry legalese and sanitized “medical” procedures.  But it is still violence and death in our names.

Rose and Thorn of the week.

Connor Friedersdorf put out an obnoxious call to his public for letters about how the “Black Lives Matter strategy” for ending police violence hadn’t worked. Luckily for all of us, Sherrilyn Ifill wrote a response on her Substack, which I recommend. Also read this.