Joaquín José Martínez grew up believing in the death penalty.
Then he wound up on death row.
Arrested in 1996 for a double murder in Tampa, he was convicted and sentenced to death in 1997. He spent four years on the state’s death row before a jury acquitted him of all charges at a retrial in 2001. He was the first European exonerated from death row in the United States.
Twenty-five years later, with Florida poised to set another state record for executions, Martínez is asking the state’s next governor to rethink the death penalty as he himself once did.
At a news conference Thursday morning at the Leroy Collins Leon County Public Library in Tallahassee, Martínez and two other men exonerated from Florida’s death row, Herman Lindsey and Seth Penalver, urged Gov.-elect Byron Donalds (R) to pause executions when he takes office and review state laws they say leave room for wrongful convictions.
“Don’t be the governor that kills an innocent person,” said Lindsey, the executive director of Witness to Innocence and who, in 2009, became the 23rd person exonerated from Florida’s death row.
Donalds, who takes office Jan. 5, will succeed Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) and assume authority to sign death warrants. His campaign told the Florida Trib last month that he “firmly supports the death penalty.” Donalds told the Famuan, Florida A&M University’s student newspaper, that he would review cases individually.
Donalds’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment Thursday from The Washington Post.
Florida, with 234 inmates on death row, carried out its 19th execution of the year on Nov. 5, tying the modern state record set in 2025.
The execution of Thomas Mitchell Overton, scheduled for Nov. 19, would break that record. Overton was convicted in 1999 of killing Michael and Susan MacIvor in the Florida Keys. He has maintained his innocence for more than three decades, according to Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, which organized Thursday’s news conference with Witness to Innocence.
Florida’s surge in executions comes as some states are moving away from capital punishment.
In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) began the process last week of commuting the death sentences of all 548 people on the state’s death row. A Gallup poll released Tuesday found that 49 percent of U.S. adults favor the death penalty for people convicted of murder, the first time support has fallen below half since 1971.
Gallup conducted the poll in early October, in the weeks after Christa Pike survived Tennessee’s attempt to execute her by lethal injection.
Florida has exonerated 30 people from death row, more than any other state, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Penalver spent 18 years in prison, including 13 on death row, before a jury acquitted him in 2012. On Thursday, he spoke about what he had lost in those years.
“I don’t talk to my oldest son. I lost my grandmother. My father, my mom,” he said through tears.
Martínez recalled a time when opposing the death penalty could seem almost “anti-American.”
He now spends part of his time in Europe. To explain how American executions are viewed from abroad, he asked listeners to imagine visiting Rome’s Colosseum and wondering how the Romans ever accepted putting people to death in front of a crowd.
“I mean, how barbaric! Well, you know what? People in Europe, in other countries, they’re thinking that same thing about the U.S.,” Martínez said. “And the U.S. is not barbaric, and Florida is not barbaric. It just needs to evolve. It just needs to grow.”
The post 3 exonerated inmates urge Florida’s governor-elect to halt executions appeared first on Washington Post.
