The Honorable Ron DeSantis
Governor of Florida
The Capitol
400 S. Monroe St.
Tallahassee, FL 32399-0001

Dear Governor DeSantis,

We write as Latino evangelical bishops, pastors, and church members representing congregations across the State of Florida. We come to you with the urgency that our reverence for life demands to ask: pause executions, without delay.

Our communities hold firmly to the belief that human life is to be protected from the moment of conception to the moment of natural death. Yet this year in Florida, thirteen people have been executed, a pace that puts the state ahead of every other state in the country combined, and more executions are already scheduled. Last year, Florida executed nineteen people, the most in the state's modern history.

It is especially troubling to consider who is being executed. Among them are people whose stories trouble our conscience. Military veterans who served this country have gone to the death chamber. So have people the courts themselves recognized as suffering from extreme mental or emotional disturbance. So have elderly and infirm prisoners, so diminished by age and decades of incarceration that they can no longer bathe or dress without help. None of those realities erase responsibility for wrongdoing. But a state that executes its own veterans and its most mentally and physically broken citizens has lost sight of what justice requires. Mercy remains a Christian obligation even in the face of grave harm.

Scriptures reveal the missional character of God’s justice, which consistently restrains human violence and protects the possibility of restoration. The Cities of Refuge reveal a God who slows retaliation, safeguards life, and keeps space open for truth, repentance, and communal repair. The death penalty closes that space forever, declaring a life beyond redemption and a community beyond healing. For a church called to participate in God’s reconciling mission, such finality cannot align with the justice of the kingdom, where mercy and restoration are never taken off the table.

"This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live." Deuteronomy 30:19

No human system is free from error. Florida has freed thirty people from death row after they were wrongly convicted, more than any other state in the nation. They include men who came within days or hours of execution for crimes they did not commit. For the state to take an innocent life is a grave sin, and one that no court can undo and no apology can reach. Scripture warns us solemnly against shedding innocent blood, and that warning falls on governments as surely as it falls on men.

We carry in our prayers every family that has lost someone to violence. Their loss is real and their grief is lasting. We hold them before God, and pledge to keep company with all whose lives have been broken by violence.

We do not raise here every question that surrounds capital punishment. We ask you to please show mercy and simply pause all executions. A pause will allow Florida to reckon honestly with what is being done, to sit with the doubt it cannot fully put to rest, to weigh the true cost borne by surviving families, to take account of the full life of each person on death row, and to leave room for the mercy and restoration that God has not yet finished offering.

A genuine reverence for life calls us toward mercy. As Latino evangelical faith communities representing hundreds of thousands of believers across this state, we stand ready to walk alongside our public servants, our communities, and one another in seeking a better way.

We ask only this: God has set before you life and death. Today, we ask that you would choose life, stop executions and let mercy have room.

With pastoral conviction and deep respect, on behalf of the undersigned Latino evangelical bishops, pastors, and church members of Florida,

Honorable Ron DeSantis
Florida Governor
The Capitol
400 S. Monroe St.
Tallahassee, FL 32399-0001