With just a few days left in 2024, I want to take a moment to reflect on our year with you, and ask for your year-end donation as we head into 2025. As is often the case with progress in civil rights and criminal justice movements, it’s sometimes one step forward and two steps back.
In 2024, we saw one execution, a dramatic reduction from 2023. However, because of the politically reactive changes to our death penalty laws last year, our non-unanimous jury sentencing scheme led to a nation-high 7 new death sentences. It is not lost on me that we would have only added one person to death row this year if unanimity were required, as it is nearly everywhere else in the country.
FADP was proud to be a part of a campaign asking President Biden to commute all 40 federal death sentences to life without parole. Just before Christmas, he commuted most, but not all, of them. One giant step forward, but still also a step back.
As I was discussing this partial victory with my team, I was reminded of just before Christmas in 2016, when the Florida Supreme Court overturned nearly half of Florida’s death sentences and ordered new trials where a jury must unanimously determine whether they should live or die.
At the time, I represented 16 people on death row. Half of them would be getting a new chance to live, and the other half were still facing execution. My team had to make 16 separate phone calls. As we made those calls, I alternated between joy and grief, elation and frustration, success and failure.
And that’s exactly how I feel right now. So, what do we do?
I am committed to using those lessons from 2016 and I vow to remember that progress towards abolition is never linear. It’s often one step forward and one or more steps back. And so, we celebrate the lives we have saved, and we double down on our commitment to saving the rest.
FADP can’t do this without you. I need your support so that FADP can continue to stay on the right side of history. I am asking you to reach deep into your heart, and donate what you can to support your commitment to ending Florida’s death penalty.
Will you help us meet our year-end goal? Click here to make a contribution.
I will leave you with one of my favorite reasons for accepting that the journey to abolition is a pendulum swing, and that our incremental progress matters. As you can see below, this year, we celebrated the 7th Christmas home for FADP Board Member Clemente Aguirre. He has never missed a Feast of the Seven Fishes at my house since he was exonerated from death row.
On our darkest days, the days when we feel like we are moving backwards and pushing a boulder uphill, I choose to remember the joy, and use it to fuel our forward progress.
Join me.
Onward,
Maria DeLiberato
FADP Executive Director
