Poll Shows Orange and Osceola County Voters Prefer Life Sentences Over Death Penalty

A new poll of voters in Orange and Osceola counties in Florida—taken in the wake of Governor Rick Scott’s removal of their locally elected State Attorney Aramis Ayala (pictured) from 22 homicide cases after she announced that her office would not pursue the death penalty—shows that the counties’ voters overwhelmingly prefer the use of life imprisonment over the death penalty as punishment for murder. The poll by Public Policy Polling, released on April 10, found that 62% of Orange and Osceola county respondents preferred some form of life in prison for those convicted of first-degree murder, while just 31% preferred the death penalty. Ayala’s March 17 decision not to seek the death penalty in any murder cases drew praise from the Florida Black Caucus and local civil rights groups, but provoked an immediate backlash from death penalty proponents. Republican Governor Rick Scott removed Ayala—a Democrat and the state’s only locally elected African-American prosecutor—from 22 murder cases and replaced her with State Attorney Brad King, a white Republican prosecutor from a neighboring judicial district. The Public Policy Polling survey found a preference for life sentences across all racial, gender, and age groups and political affiliations. 73% of black voters preferred some form of life sentence as the punishment for murder, as compared to 19% who preferred the death penalty. Whites and Latinos also preferred life sentences over the death penalty, both by margins of 29 percentage points. The preference for life sentences transcended party affiliation, although there were clear partisan differences. 76% of Democrats preferred life sentences, while 21% favored the death penalty; Independents preferred life sentences by a margin of 22 percentage points (55%-33%); and Republicans preferred life sentences by 5 percentage points (49%-44%). A majority of voters also supported a State Attorney taking a “data-driven” approach to reducing bias in sentencing and considering costs to taxpayers and the effect on victims’ families when deciding whether to seek a death sentence. Kenneth B. Nunn, a professor of law at University of Florida’s Levin College of Law, said, “These results clearly show that Orange and Osceola voters strongly prefer life sentences over the death penalty. State Attorney Aramis Ayala’s position on the death penalty is very much in line with the position of her constituents.” Governor Scott lost Orange County by 12 percentage points and Osceola County by 9 percentage points in the 2014 gubernatorial election.

(S. Powers, “PPP poll finds Orange, Osceola counties prefer life punishment to death sentence,” Florida Politics, April 10, 2017; “Orange and Osceola Counties Survey Results,” Public Policy Polling, April 5-7, 2017.) See Public Opinion.