Florida's Final Sentence

Florida leads the nation in death-row exonerations.

That fact alone demands explanation.

In Florida's Final Sentence, Carey Randall examines decades of wrongful convictions and executions to uncover how certainty repeatedly replaced scrutiny inside Florida's capital punishment system-and how those decisions cost innocent people their freedom and, in some cases, their lives.

Drawing from documented cases, court findings, and historical records, this book traces the patterns that made irreversible error possible: coerced confessions, mistaken eyewitness identifications, incentivized informant testimony, unreliable forensic science, and institutional resistance to admitting error.

This is not an argument built on theory or ideology.
It is a record built on names, timelines, and outcomes.

From teenagers pressured into confessing, to innocent fathers nearly executed, to men put to death before the truth emerged, Florida's Final Sentence reveals a system that valued finality over accuracy-and certainty over truth.

Inside this book, you'll discover:

• Why Florida produces more death-row exonerations than any other state

• How common investigative shortcuts become catastrophic in capital cases

• The role of false confessions, eyewitness error, and informant incentives

• How delayed science and procedural barriers prolonged injustice

• What Florida's history reveals about the risks of irreversible punishment

Florida's Final Sentence does not ask whether mistakes can happen.
It documents that they already have-and asks what that history demands going forward.

For readers interested in criminal justice, capital punishment, wrongful convictions, and institutional accountability, this book offers an unflinching examination of what happens when a fallible system is trusted with absolute power.