Unwilling to tackle the things that school shooters use to shoot up schools — namely, guns — Republicans instead propose ideas that are ineffective, illegal or both.
Behold Rick Scott, the GOP junior senator from Florida. After Monday’s school shooting in Nashville, Tennessee, he offered the following thoughts and prayers:
We need to consider an automatic death penalty for school shooters. Life in prison is not enough for the deranged monsters who go into our schools to kill innocent kids & educators.
— Rick Scott (@SenRickScott) March 27, 2023
Pray for all facing the unimaginable in Nashville. This is horrible & must stop. https://t.co/PbCkJsSddE
Leaving aside, for a moment, the death penalty’s dubious deterrent effect, the more immediate issue with “automatic” capital punishment is that it’s illegal.
If a defendant is convicted in a death penalty case, then a separate trial is held in which the jury weighs aggravating and mitigating factors, to determine whether to recommend a death sentence. Prosecutors wouldn’t go through that process if they didn’t have to. Indeed, the Supreme Court has struck down mandatory capital punishment on multiple occasions, reiterating that individualized sentencing is needed. Of course, as we’ve starkly seen unfold, precedent is only worth what the Supreme Court decides it’s worth at a given moment. Earlier this month, I noted that another Republican politician from Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis, pushed a bill that would give the death penalty for the rape of a child, which also would contravene high court precedent. Whether any of these precedents would stand if challenged remains to be seen at a court that has nurtured the GOP’s gun and execution obsessions alike.
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro," a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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