Child rapists can now face execution for their crimes in Florida.
The controversial law has now come into effect, with Florida courts officially giving the green light for capital punishment for those who have raped a child under the age of 12.
During a May 1 bill-signing event in Brevard County, Governor Ron DeSantis said the new law is ‘for the protection of children’, calling these types of predators ‘the worst kind’.
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"My view is you have some of these people that will be serial rapists of six, seven-year-old kids,” he also told WFLA.
"I think the death penalty is the only appropriate punishment when you have situations like that."
State Senate Minority Leader Lauren Book and Republican State Senator Jonathan Martin co-sponsored the bipartisan bill and said those who sexually molest children are likely to repeat their crime.
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Therefore, they should receive the ultimate sentence.
"Once a predator has a child ensnared, they will harm that child over and over and over again," Book said, as per The New York Post.
The bill was approved 34-5 in the Senate and 95-14 in the House, defying a Supreme Court ruling.
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However, there have been many critics against the new law.
In voting against the measure in April, Senator Rosalind Osgood, D-Fort Lauderdale, said the bill presented her with a ‘quandary’ due to her ‘good faith’.
“I love kids, and I’ll do anything to protect them,” Osgood said, as per CBS News.
“But I struggle from a faith perspective. If I believe in my faith that God can redeem and save anybody, then how do I support someone getting the death penalty? And I’m just talking about me. That’s my struggle. That’s my challenge," she said.
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Maria DeLiberato, the executive director of Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, also advised against it, citing the process could inevitably last 'decades-long’, as per WJXT.
According to the Child Welfare Information Gateway, around 90 per cent of child sex abuse victims know their abuser and about 30 per cent of children are abused by family members.
DeLiberato added these statistics show that victims will ‘bear the weight’ of a death sentence served to someone they know.
“So now, you’ve got this whole dynamic where a child is going to bear the weight of a possible death sentence to a neighbor, an uncle, grandfather, something that someone that they know that everybody in their family is not going to feel the exact same way about,” she said.
Charisa Bossinakis