A report by a national nonprofit group that studies the death penalty found that Florida remains among the most active states in using it and put more defendants on death row in 2012 than any other state.
The Death Penalty Information Center's report reveals that only nine states executed a prisoner this year, with Florida putting three to death. Texas, with 15, executed the most defendants, the report states.
However, the Sunshine State far exceeded other states in new death sentences: 21 defendants were sentenced to die in Florida through mid-December, the research says.
That's more than twice Texas' figure for the same period. California, with 14 death sentences, was the only other state to reach double digits.
Overall, the report found that death-penalty usage in 2012 "continued to decline, with fewer states endorsing capital punishment, relatively few death sentences being imposed, and executions being carried out at only half the rate of the late 1990s."
Nationally, the number of death sentences in 2012 was the second-lowest since 1976, said the center, which has no explicit stance on the death penalty but is generally critical of its use.
"The death penalty has been declining in use for about a decade and that continued in 2012," Executive Director Richard Dieter told the Orlando Sentinel. "There are now less states with the death penalty, as Connecticut abolished it this year."
Dieter said that the majority of new death-penalty cases in 2012 were in a small minority of states, with Florida, California, Texas and Pennsylvania accounting for 65 percent of new death sentences.
Often, he said, the inception of those cases is even more local, with prosecutors in individual jurisdictions contributing larger quantities of death-penalty cases. For example, several of Florida's new death cases in 2012 came from Duval County, the center's research shows.
"That's reflective of the philosophical position ... of the prosecutor about how to proceed, and what's the threshold for a death-penalty case," Dieter said.
Jeff Ashton, state attorney-elect for Orange and Osceola counties, said that he wasn't surprised that Florida was among the leaders in new death sentencings. The state's citizens have been clear that they support the death penalty "in extreme cases," he said.
Ashton said choosing to pursue the death penalty is "a very personal decision" for a state attorney that can only be made after weighing the facts of each case.
"Ultimately, you have to determine whether you have sufficient aggravating circumstances to allow the jury to make that decision," Ashton said. "You don't want to start the process unless you have a reasonable probability of the jury actually giving the death penalty."
Three people were executed in Florida in 2012:
-- Robert Waterhouse, convicted of raping and murdering 29-year-old Deborah Kammerer in Tampa Bay;
-- David Alan Gore, a serial rapist who admitted to killing four women and two teenage girls in the 1980s;
-- Manuel Pardo, a former police officer who killed nine people in the late 1980s.
On Dec. 17, a judge in Seminole County ordered a death sentence for William Davis III, a mentally ill Army veteran who confessed to kidnapping a receptionist from a used-car lot, raping and strangling her in 2009.
Meanwhile, the Orange-Osceola State Attorney's Office recently announced it will seek death in the case of Bessman Okafor, a career criminal charged with murdering a witness in a home-invasion case. Ashton, who takes office Jan. 8, told the Sentinel he will review the circuit's pending death-penalty cases to "make sure that they're ones I agree with."
There are 406 people on death row in Florida, according to Department of Corrections records.
Copyright 2012 - Orlando Sentinel
McClatchy-Tribune News Service
