In Posthumously Released Video, Former Florida Supreme Court Chief Justice Calls for End to Death Penalty

In a video inter­view posthu­mous­ly released on the anniver­sary of the first mod­ern exon­er­a­tion of a Florida death-row pris­on­er, for­mer Florida Supreme Court Chief Justice Gerald Kogan has called for abo­li­tion of the state’s death penal­ty. ​“I believe that the death penal­ty should absolute­ly not be a pun­ish­ment deliv­ered by the State of Florida, or for that mat­ter, nei­ther any place in the United States or the world,” Kogan said.

The inter­view was record­ed by attor­ney and film­mak­er Ted Corless dur­ing a trip Justice Kogan took with 40 Florida anti-death penal­ty activists to the Equal Justice Initiative’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. Kogan died on March 4, 2021, at the age of 87. The video was released on July 16, the 48^th anniver­sary of the exon­er­a­tion of David Keaton. Keaton was the first for­mer death-row pris­on­er to be exon­er­at­ed after the U.S. Supreme Court’s his­toric deci­sion in Furman v. Georgia in 1972 struck down all exist­ing U.S. death-penal­ty laws and ush­ered in the mod­ern era of the U.S. death penal­ty. The 30 death-row exon­er­a­tions in Florida are by far the most in the nation. 

In the video, Justice Kogan speaks about his 60-year jour­ney as a mem­ber of the Florida bar from death-penal­ty sup­port­er to death-penal­ty oppo­nent. He voic­es con­cerns over the grave issues he wit­nessed through­out his career regard­ing the admin­is­tra­tion of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. Foremost among those con­cerns, he says, are the risk of exe­cut­ing inno­cent peo­ple and the punishment’s inher­ent unfair­ness. ​“We are exe­cut­ing peo­ple who prob­a­bly are inno­cent,” Kogan said.

Kogan’s legal career began as a state pros­e­cu­tor, and he led the Miami-Dade County prosecutor’s cap­i­tal crimes divi­sion through­out the 1960s. Kogan then rep­re­sent­ed defen­dants in mur­der cas­es for sev­er­al years, before being appoint­ed to the Florida Supreme Court by Governor Bob Martinez in 1987. He served as Chief Justice from 1996 to 1998.

Kogan ​“under­stood the com­plex­i­ty and human frailty of a sys­tem that ends with the tak­ing of life,” wrote Mark Elliot, the exec­u­tive direc­tor of Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, in a July 16 guest col­umn in the Orlando Sentinel. ​“Justice Kogan knew the jus­tice sys­tem inti­mate­ly. He was involved in more than a thou­sand death penal­ty cas­es. If a con­ser­v­a­tive for­mer pros­e­cu­tor that led Florida’s high­est court thinks we should end the death penal­ty, then it’s some­thing our cur­rent lead­ers should seriously consider.”

Kogan did not always oppose cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment but says that his direct expe­ri­ences with the death penal­ty pushed him to sup­port abo­li­tion. Kogan described how the jus­tice sys­tem places a tremen­dous bur­den on those charged with decid­ing the fate of a per­son con­demned to death. In the inter­view, Kogan spoke of the grav­i­ty of being ​“the last word” before a per­son is executed. 

According to Elliot, Kogan ​“rec­og­nized the ter­ri­ble bur­den that cap­i­tal cas­es put not only on the judi­cia­ry, but on our state’s bud­get, drain­ing resources that could be spent on ser­vices for vic­tims of vio­lent crime and their fam­i­lies or pro­grams to address crime rates .… He saw first­hand how the death penal­ty tar­gets and ensnares the men­tal­ly ill, the poor, the trau­ma­tized — the most vul­ner­a­ble among us.”

Kogan said he was con­vinced Florida had exe­cut­ed three inno­cent peo­ple, though he did not name them. ​“We can­not bring back to life peo­ple that we made mis­takes about. And we just have to do some­thing,” Kogan urged. 

Florida has exe­cut­ed 99 pris­on­ers since re-enact­ing the death penal­ty after Furman. In that time, it has exon­er­at­ed one wrong­ful­ly con­vict­ed death-row pris­on­er for every 3.3 peo­ple it has executed.