Dear Governor DeSantis and Leaders of the Florida State Legislature,

We urge you to protect people with serious mental illness from the death penalty.

We know so much more today about serious mental illness than when Florida’s death penalty law was enacted in 1972. Everything we’ve learned indicates the need to treat people with serious mental illness differently in the criminal justice system.

Serious mental illness is relevant to everything from a defendant’s culpability to his ability to participate in the legal process.

Informed by medical and scientific breakthroughs over four decades, we now understand that biologically based brain disorders and illnesses can lead to psychoses, delusions, hallucinations, and other equally disabling psychological conditions that interfere with judgment, reasoning, and impulse control.

Just as with persons with intellectual disabilities and juveniles who are constitutionally protected from execution, defendants with these serious mental disorders are inherently less culpable than fully functioning defendants and should be categorically exempt from the death penalty.

Serious mental illness also impacts a person’s ability to participate in legal proceedings, to help or communicate with their attorneys, and to defend themselves. This makes them as a group, uniquely vulnerable to wrongful convictions, as well as to execution.

There is no penological justification for continuing to execute people with serious mental illness.

While studies on the death penalty have neither proven nor disproven a deterrent effect, it is clearly not a deterrent for persons who, because of symptomatic disease, have diminished judgment, reasoning, and impulse control. As for retribution, it can hardly be justified for people who are both more vulnerable and less culpable.

Other provisions in Florida’s law fail to provide complete or sufficient protection against the death penalty for people with serious mental illness. While jurors are required to consider serious mental illness as a mitigating factor in the sentencing phase of a capital trial, it is well known that weighing the mitigating and aggravating factors is a complicated process that fails to ensure that serious mental illness is appropriately considered. Likewise, Florida’s extremely narrow insanity defense law fails to protect seriously mentally ill persons from execution.

Because serious mental illness is not always investigated in the initial trial phase, it is often raised in post-conviction proceedings. This leads to a longer process that is costly and painful for the victims’ families. Protecting people with serious mental illness would ensure that appropriate cases are removed earlier in the process, thereby saving these families from decades of added pain and trauma.

Governor DeSantis and Leaders of the Legislature: it is time for Florida to protect people with serious mental illness from the death penalty.