15 states are seeking to make child rapists subject to death penalty

Led by Florida, 15 state Attorneys General have signed a letter asking U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi to support execution of child rapists and to challenge a decades-old ruling preventing the death penalty for pedophiles, reported Florida Politics.

The newest signature on Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier’s September letter came Wednesday from Liz Murrill, Louisiana’s chief legal officer, asking Bondi to co-sign various state efforts to execute child rapists. They hope Bondi will take on the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2008 Kennedy v. Louisiana decision holding the death penalty for child rapists unconstitutional.

“We have every confidence that, with President Trump’s strong leadership and with principled, rule-of-law Justices on the Supreme Court, Kennedy’s days are numbered, and child rapists can be appropriately punished for their unspeakable crimes,” Uthmeier wrote in his Sep. 2 letter.

“The U.S. Supreme Court needs to reverse this egregiously wrong ruling,” Murrill echoed in a Wednesday social media post, announcing that her name would be slotted alongside the 14 other sitting and former Republican Attorneys General. Andrew Bailey, former Missouri Attorney General and now co-deputy director of the FBI, was one of the signatories.

Weeks after Uthmeier emailed his letter to Bondi, she joined President Donald Trump on Sep. 25 to announce planned expansions of the death penalty. Trump signed a presidential memorandum seeking to reinstate the death penalty in Washington, D.C., as Bondi announced the DOJ would pursue capital punishment nationwide, CNN reported.

This followed Trump’s Jan. 20 executive order demanding protection of the death penalty and asking Bondi to override Supreme Court precedents that “limit the authority of State and Federal governments to impose capital punishment.”

Her office declined to comment on whether she would try to overturn the Kennedy ruling.

Florida and the death penalty

Uthmeier’s letter was only the latest step Florida has taken in the death penalty sphere. Under Gov. Ron DeSantis’ leadership, the GOP-dominated Legislature passed a first-in-the-nation law allowing the state to kill pedophiles who rape children younger than 12. It was the first death penalty law passed for non-murders since the Kennedy decision.

That same year, DeSantis signed a law lowering the threshold for death penalty sentencing from a unanimous jury decision to an 8-4 supermajority. That law came after Nikolas Cruz, the Parkland shooter who murdered 17 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, received life in prison after a jury voted 9-3 for death.

Since then, Florida has expanded the aggravated factors needed to recommend a death sentence, added human trafficking as another non-murder crime that could be subject to the death penalty, and allowed for the creation of new death penalty methods. DeSantis has shattered Florida’s long-standing one-year record of eight executions set in 1984: In 2025 so far, he’s already scheduled 15 executions, 13 of which have been carried out.

This aggressive stance has drawn the ire of anti-death penalty groups, including the statewide organization Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, which argue that Florida’s slew of new laws are both unconstitutional and go against judicial precedent.

“While Florida lawmakers have made their intent clear — that they knowingly and purposely passed an unconstitutional law — they still have to wait to be able to even bring it to the U.S. Supreme Court (who also would have to agree to hear it) to try to overturn that long established precedent,” Maria DeLiberato, FADP’s Executive Director, told the Florida Phoenix in a written statement.

What is the Kennedy v. Louisiana case?

In 2003, Patrick O’Neal Kennedy was sentenced to death in Louisiana for the 1998 rape of his 8-year-old stepdaughter. This aligned with the state’s 1995 law allowing pedophiles to be executed if they raped a victim younger than 13.

Kennedy appealed, pointing out that the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled the death penalty for rapists with adult victims unconstitutional, but the Louisiana Supreme Court upheld his sentence. That court noted that five other states at the time had death penalty laws for child rape.

Kennedy turned to the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that five states was not enough to establish a “national consensus” that executing child rapists should be legal. In a 5-4 decision, SCOTUS took his side. Kennedy has since been sentenced to life in prison.

Now 60, he is being held at the Elayn Hunt Correctional Center in St. Gabriel, Louisiana.

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