DeSantis: Sex Offenders Who Commit the Worst of the Worst Crimes Deserve the Worst of the Worst Punishment

DeSANTIS: “And what happens is, the perpetrators of these crimes are often times serial offenders, and if someone does one, if they — if they rape a child like — and these are very young, very young children, sometimes like 6, 7, 8 years old, if they do that once, chances are they will do it again unless they’re stopped, unless they are incapacitated. And so, we really believe that part of a just society is to have appropriate punishment, and so if you commit a crime that is really, really heinous, you should have the ultimate punishment. And so what this bill does is it challenges the U.S. Supreme Court for recently deciding — probably six or seven years ago they decided by 5-4, after over 200 years of our Constitution being in, place that somehow you could never have capital punishment for crimes like rape, even though some of these are some of the worst of the worst, even though you can have serial offenders who have violated multiple children under the age of 12. And so we think that that decision was wrong. We think that in the worst of the worst cases, the only appropriate punishment is the ultimate punishment, and so this bill sets up a procedure to be able to challenge that precedent, to be able to say that in Florida we think that the worst of the worst crimes deserve the worst of the worst punishment, and I think that that’s the only thing that's appropriate."