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They Are Not Afraid of Us: The Death Penalty and Abolition

They Are Not Afraid of Us: The Death Penalty and Abolition

Last updated on: July 27, 2026 at 8:31 am by Jeff Hood

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They Are Not Afraid of Us: The Death Penalty and Abolition 2026-07-27T08:31:28-06:00 Jeff Hood

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Florida's Execution Chamber

Florida’s Execution Chamber

The Ongoing Fight to Abolish the Death Penalty

The abolition movement has failed. Florida is simply the place where the failure has become most visible.

Tomorrow, July 28, the State of Florida will kill James Duckett at noon. Six hours later, it will kill Dominick Occhicone. Two men. One building. One afternoon.

It has been over sixty years since Florida did this. The state stopped for a reason. Killing two men in a single day requires a certain confidence…a certainty that nobody is going to make you pay for it. Florida has that confidence again. We gave it to them.

I want to say plainly what most of us in this movement will spend the next week avoiding. This is not simply a story about Ron DeSantis. This is a story about us. The scheduling of two executions six hours apart is a judgment about the strength of the opposition. Somebody in Tallahassee ran the numbers and concluded abolitionists could do nothing to stop either killing. They were right.

Occhicone is eighty years old. He will be the oldest man Florida has ever killed in the modern era. He takes that distinction from Dennis Sochor, who was seventy-four when they killed him earlier this month. The record lasted two weeks. That is the tempo we are talking about now.

We won the front end and abandoned everyone already condemned

For thirty years this movement has operated on a single theory of change. Reduce the intake. Elect better prosecutors. Improve capital defense. Narrow the categories through litigation. Chip away at the eligible population until the machine starves.

It worked. New death sentences are at historic lows. We should be honest about that victory…and honest about what it has cost.

We built a magnificent apparatus for preventing the next death sentence. We never built comparable institutions capable of defending the people already condemned. This is not a claim that nobody is doing the work. Capital post-conviction offices exist. Habeas units exist. Abolitionist organizations exist. What does not exist is an organized body of political power whose purpose is to keep a condemned man alive after his appeals have run out.

A governor who can read a trend line understands exactly what our success means. The pipeline is closing. The row will not be replenished. So he empties it while he still can.

Acceleration is what our victory looks like from the inside of a cell. Florida is not defying the national decline of the death penalty. Florida is responding to it predictably. We taught the states that time was running out. We should not be shocked that they started to hurry.

We made abolition contingent on error

The innocence frame was the most effective public argument this movement ever produced. It was also a trap we walked into with our eyes open.

We told America the death penalty was wrong because we might kill the wrong man. It moves people. It moves juries. It also concedes the entire moral question. It says the killing is only intolerable when the paperwork is bad.

Now watch what Florida selected. A former police officer convicted of raping and drowning an eleven-year-old girl. An eighty-year-old man who killed his former girlfriend’s parents four decades ago. Duckett got a stay in March for DNA testing. The testing produced no result. The Florida Supreme Court lifted the stay on July 8 and the governor signed a new warrant six days later. We played our strongest card. It bought him four months.

These men were chosen. They were chosen because no sympathetic frame is available and we have yet to build an argument that survives without one.

We confused witness with pressure

In the midst of the activity at Florida’s execution chamber, take an honest look at what our movement is producing this week.

Statements of outrage. A letter from the Florida bishops that concedes the crimes are gravely evil before asking for commutation. Take action buttons on websites. Appeals to the governor. Vigils on street corners.

Every one of these is an act of witness. Not one of them is a mechanism. There is no cost attached to ignoring any of it. The governor knows the exact size of the disapproval he is absorbing because he has absorbed it twenty-nine times since January of last year.

We hold the candle. We read the name. We go home. Then we do it again in three weeks. We have mistaken the sincerity of our grief for the exercise of power…and the state has learned to schedule around our sadness.

Understand me. I am not saying the vigil is worthless. I have stood in enough parking lots to know what happens in them. The men inside know exactly who came. The record of what Florida has done will exist because somebody stood out there and wrote it down. Almost nobody is converted to this work by a policy brief…they are converted standing in the dark beside someone who is angry.

The vigil is not the failure. The failure is a movement whose maximum output is a vigil.

Hesitation

We have spent decades perfecting the liturgy of the defeated.

We know how to hold candles. We know how to issue statements. We know how to collect petition signatures. We know how to mourn with remarkable faithfulness.

We have forgotten how to make politicians hesitate.

We shouldn’t be surprised that there is a line at the door of Florida’s execution chamber…or any other execution chamber for that matter.

Catholic

Politics and Religion

Florida's execution chamber

James Duckett

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