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Support of the death penalty is almost a prerequisite to holding statewide office in Florida.

Kill more. Kill them faster.

But this political agenda is clashing ever more often with the constitutional requirement of due process.

And so we are spending millions of dollars sentencing far more people to death than we can possibly kill.

The result has been a growing glut of death-row inmates.

Consider these statistics:

*Since the 1970s, Virginia has executed 121 inmates. It currently has 14 death-row inmates.

*Oklahoma has had 96 executions. It currently has 85 death-row inmates.

*Florida has had 69 executions. We have 399 inmates on death row.

At our current pace of executions, it would take 200 years to clear them out.

More people on Florida’s death row have been exonerated, resentenced to a prison term or died while awaiting execution than have been executed.

The 23 inmates exonerated and set free are the most of any state, making our system the most error-prone in the country.

Some of these inmates were obviously innocent.

Some probably were guilty, but trial errors, prosecutorial misconduct or other issues nullified their convictions.

Ironically, if these freed inmates had been sentenced to life in prison without parole instead of death, they probably would still be in jail because they wouldn’t have had access to the scrutiny and appeals granted death-row inmates.

“There’s some advantage to being sentenced to death,” says O.H. Eaton Jr., a former Seminole County judge and an expert on Florida’s death penalty.

Eaton has sentenced inmates to die and overturned death verdicts, most notably that of “Crazy Joe” Spaziano, a motorcycle-gang leader convicted of murder based on the flimsy testimony of a drug-using teenager hypnotized by investigators.

Eaton also teaches a course in the death penalty that judges who handle death cases are required to take. He presents them with a hypothetical case to see how many would impose the death penalty versus life without parole. There usually is a split, meaning death sentences have less to do with the facts of the case than who is the judge.

There also is no rhyme or reason to which cases are pursued as capital crimes. The original purpose of the death penalty was to execute the worst of the worst. But legislators have consistently expanded the types of crimes eligible for the death sentence, so now it can be pursued with most all murder charges.

This gives state attorneys wide leeway in deciding what cases to pursue as death-penalty cases. Most state attorneys don’t have written guidelines, making their decisions completely arbitrary.

Sometimes they are driven by politics, as with Casey Anthony. This is not a death-penalty case, and in the unlikely event she is sentenced to death, it will be overturned on appeal.

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So why pursue it? A death case requires jurors who state beforehand they are willing to impose a death sentence. Such jurors are more prone to deliver guilty verdicts. If you have a shaky, circumstantial case in a high-profile trial like this, you increase the odds of a conviction by stacking the deck with a death jury.

Back in 2008, Orange-Osceola State Attorney Lawson Lamar complained his office was swamped with 122 pending murder cases. He said prosecutors were overwhelmed and he needed more money from the state. And here are his top two prosecutors bogged down on Casey, with many more working behind the scenes.

There are plenty more problems with Florida’s death penalty, more than I can list here. A big one is that it only takes a majority of jurors to recommend a death penalty, rather than unanimous agreement.

All this comes with a cost. Death cases are very expensive because they require two trials, one establishing guilt and the second to impose the sentence. Then come years of appeals. One death-row inmate had his case reviewed 20 times by state and federal courts before his sentence was reduced to life in prison.

Judge Eaton cites estimates that each execution costs Florida about $20 million.

Florida isn’t alone. A number of states face similar problems. The result is that executions are down, and the number of people sentenced to death is declining. Life without parole increasingly is becoming an acceptable substitute. In effect, the legal system finally has begun rebelling against the political system.

And yet this year Gov. Rick Scott and legislators abolished the Commission on Capital Cases, a small state agency that tracks cases, keeps statistics and makes recommendations to the courts and lawmakers.

“The death penalty is not working,” Eaton says. “I don’t think you can find a trial judge around who thinks the system is working. It can’t be fixed. A death sentence in Florida has become a life sentence on death row.”

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