OUTLIER COUNTIES: A Pledge of Change After Years of Error and Racial Bias in Hillsborough County Death Sentences

Change may be in the off­ing in Hillsborough County, Florida after vot­ers oust­ed incum­bent State Attorney Mark Ober on November 8 and replaced him with a reform can­di­date, Andrew Warren (pic­tured).

Hillsborough ranks among the 2% of U.S. coun­ties that are respon­si­ble for a major­i­ty of the pris­on­ers cur­rent­ly on death rows across the coun­try. The five death sen­tences imposed in Hillsborough from 2010 to 2015 under Ober’s tenure placed the coun­ty among the 16 coun­ties that had imposed the high­est num­ber of death sen­tences in the U.S. — more than 99.5% of other counties. 

Hillsborough’s aggres­sive use of the death penal­ty has been plagued by error — three pris­on­ers sen­tenced to death in Hillsborough have lat­er been exon­er­at­ed — and reflects a lega­cy of racial bias and exclu­sion. Tampa, the largest city in Hillsborough County, was among the four cities with the nation’s largest Ku Klux Klan pop­u­la­tions after the Great Depression. The Hillsborough County Bar Association did not update their char­ter to allow Black lawyers to join until 1972. 

The lega­cy of dis­crim­i­na­tion is evi­dent in the recent death sen­tences imposed in the coun­ty: two-thirds have been imposed on Black defen­dants; and although a sig­nif­i­cant major­i­ty of mur­der vic­tims in the coun­ty are Black, 60% of the vic­tims in the cas­es in which death sen­tences were returned were White. 

Incoming state attor­ney Warren has vowed to address both the overzeal­ous pur­suit of the death penal­ty in the coun­ty and the prob­lem of wrong­ful con­vic­tions. After Hillsborough was includ­ed in the Fair Punishment Project’s report on out­lier coun­ties, Warren said, ​“That we are an extreme out­lier in such a crit­i­cal area is dis­turb­ing.… Our use of the death penal­ty needs to be fair, con­sis­tent, and rare. Unfortunately, for many years, it hasn’t been.” Warren has also pro­posed the cre­ation of a Conviction Integrity Unit to iden­ti­fy and redress wrongful convictions.