Submitted by Mike Appleton, Guest Blogger
“What did you learn in school today, dear little boy of mine?
I learned that policemen are my friends
I learned that justice never ends
I learned that murderers die for their crimes
Even if we make a mistake sometimes
And that’s what I learned in school today
That’s what I learned in school.”
–Tom Paxton, “What Did You Learn in School Today?”
When Rick Scott was in the hospital business, his company specialized in billing Medicare for services that were not performed. Now he is governor of a state that specializes in sending people to death row for crimes they did not commit.
Florida conservatives love the death penalty. Since it was reactivated in 1979, 75 people have been executed. In the past two years, Florida has sentenced more persons to death than any other state. And Gov. Scott is setting records of his own, executing eight prisoners to date, the highest rate of any Florida governor in the past thirty years. But despite this carnage, the current death row population still exceeds 400 people, larger than the entire population of many small towns. This is at least partially due to the fact that Florida is one of only two death penalty states that do not require a unanimous jury recommendation of death. Alabama requires a 10-2 vote. Florida is decidedly more majoritarian; a 7-5 favorable vote is sufficient.
Florida also leads the nation in another grim statistic. Since executions have resumed, 24 death row inmates have been exonerated, far more than in any other state. This means that for every three persons executed over the past thirty years, one additional death row inmate has been found innocent and released. One would think that given this statistic, combined with Florida’s history of botched executions and chronic underfunding of agencies charged with defending those on death row, the legislature would be looking at ways to improve the system. And one would be wrong. On June 14, 2013, Gov. Scott signed the Timely Justice Act, a bill that is intended to hasten executions. The new statute was signed by the governor over the opposition of every major newspaper in Florida, the Innocence Project and other bar groups, the Florida Conference of Catholic Bishops and ordinary citizens who sent thousands of letters and emails to Tallahassee. It requires that death warrants be signed within 30 days following certification by the Clerk of the Florida Supreme Court that initial post-conviction appellate proceedings have been completed. It also requires that a death warrant specify an execution date within 180 days. And it imposes strict procedural deadlines for other post-conviction motions.
The chief sponsor of the legislation, Rep. Matt Gaetz, a Fort Walton Beach Republican, described the bill as “a modest down payment on the reforms that we need to ensure that victims’ families aren’t waiting decades for justice.” As if to confirm that the intent of the new law is wholly unrelated to preventing the execution of innocent persons, Rep. Gaetz also observed, “Only God can judge, but we sure can set up the meeting.”
Attorneys have already filed proceedings in the Florida Supreme Court seeking to block implementation of the new law for numerous constitutional infirmities, not the least of which is the legislative intrusion on the rule-making authority of the judiciary, a game played with increasing relish by legislative bodies. But once again we are witnessing the worst excesses of the evangelical right. No reasonable person can deny any longer the arbitrary and racist history of capital punishment in this country. It remains the nation’s shame that capital punishment still exists. However, until we decide to reject the efforts of a minority to impose Old Testament views on the justice system, we will continue to see this sort of legislative abomination.
Florida Accelerates Its Broken System of Criminal Justice
What are state lawmakers doing? Making the process quicker, and more unjust, than before.
Andrew Cohen
Jun 3 2013
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/06/florida-accelerates-its-broken-system-of-criminal-justice/276457/
Excerpt:
The Public Defender Cases
Meanwhile, on May 23rd, as the debate over the Timely Justice Act intensified, the Supreme Court of Florida issued two related rulings that remind us how much Florida officials have tried over the years to deprive indigent defendants of their right to “effective assistance” of counsel. The joint opinion in Public Defender v. State of Florida is a must-read. The key question was whether the public defender’s office in Miami-Dade County could withdraw from representing clients in non-capital felony cases because of routinely “excessive caseloads.” On a subject with which the Court is quite familiar, the justices answered with a qualified “yes.”
Over and over again, the Florida Supreme Court has stymied attempts by lawmakers and lower court judges to undermine the right to counsel most famously expressed 50 years ago by the United States Supreme Court in a Florida case styled Gideon v. Wainwright. In Public Defender, the majority (the vote was 5-2) devoted page after page in its ruling to a litany of its past rulings in which it cited the Court’s “inherent judicial power” to countermand legislative attempts to restrict the state’s indigent defense system. Despite their best efforts, the justices have been only marginally successful. How bad is it? From Page 23 of the ruling:
“While we cannot succinctly recount the lengthy records in these two cases, we are struck by the breadth and depth of the evidence of how the excessive caseload has impacted the Public Defender’s representation of indigent defendants. For example, the number of criminal cases assigned to the Public Defender has increased by 29% since 2004, while his trial budget was reduced by 12.6% through budget cuts and holdbacks over the fiscal years 2007-2008 and 2008-2009. After the implementation of Article V revisions in July 2004, the Legislature only funded 32 of the 82 overload attorneys that Miami Dade County had been funding.
“The noncapital felony caseload has been in the range of 400 cases per attorney for a number of years. Yet, even the highest caseload standard recommended by professional legal organizations is 200 to 300 less. The combined record in these two cases comprises twenty six volumes. The evidence in each case includes testimony, documents, statistics, and expert opinion. At the time the motions were filed in these cases, there were 105 attorneys to represent clients in 45,055 new and reopened cases.
“While the Public Defender has utilized a number of procedures to reduce the excessive caseloads (such as applying for grants in order to hire more attorneys; creating special units to handle bond hearings and early representation; and assigning third-degree felony caseloads to supervising attorneys, capital case attorneys, and first and second-degree felony attorneys), it has not alleviated the overall problem. Third-degree felony attorneys often have as many as fifty cases set for trial in one week because of the excessive caseload.
“Clients who are not in custody are essentially unrepresented for long periods between arraignment and trial. Attorneys are routinely unable to interview clients, conduct investigations, take depositions, prepare mitigation, or counsel clients about pleas offered at arraignment. Instead, the office engages in “triage” with the clients who are in custody or who face the most serious charges getting priority to the detriment of the other clients.”
Faced with these facts when the lawsuit was filed a few years ago, Florida officials didn’t rush to the aid its innocent-until-proven-guilty citizens. Instead, state attorneys argued that Miami-Dade couldn’t withdraw from its cases generally but had to establish a legal justification for doing so in each case. Moreover, state officials argued, the “excessive caseload” at the public defenders’ office was not a statutorily justified reason not to withdraw from a case. “[I]n no case shall the court approve a withdrawal by the public defender based solely upon the inadequacy of funding or excessive workload of the public defender,” reads a Florida statute.
Ponder that for a second. The state legislature fails or refuses to adequately fund public defenders’ offices. The result is catastrophic for thousands of Florida citizens who are too poor to afford their own attorneys. And then the lawmakers turn around and seek to preclude those lawyers from refusing to handle cases they know they cannot possibly handle competently because of the hundreds of other cases they have at the time.* These are, not incidentally, many of the same lawmakers who just passed the Timely Justice Act, which is just another symptom of the same disease. The solution to injustice can never be more injustice.
Off Topic but…Notice whenever there is a false flag, there is ALWAYS a Florida connection! [9/11, Zimmerman, Sandy Hook (the guy who was sitting in cop car but didn’t do it), etc…]. Fl has been taken over by evil. Co, NY, Az too!
Interesting article, Mike.
*****
Death Trap
Florida’s horrifying plan to make it quicker and easier to execute its death row inmates.
By Emily Bazelon
June 15, 2013
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2013/06/timely_justice_act_florida_s_horrifying_plan_to_make_it_quicker_and_easier.single.html
Excerpt:
On Wednesday night in Florida, a man named William Van Poyck was executed by lethal injection. Van Poyck was convicted of killing a prison guard, Fred Griffis, in 1987. He always said that it was his accomplice who pulled the trigger, and last month, that man’s wife came forward for the first time to say that was true. But the Florida courts turned down many appeals from Van Poyck over the years—twice by a vote of 4 to 3. And this week, the U.S. Supreme Court denied him a last-minute reprieve…
What’s the problem in Florida—why do they convict and sentence to die so many innocent people? It’s the only state in the country in which a simple majority of the jury—a vote of 7 to 5—can send a man or woman to the electric chair or lethal injection. Every other state but one requires a unanimous vote. (The other exception to that rule, Alabama, requires 10 votes).
Another huge problem in Florida: the low quality of defense lawyers, especially at trial. Florida Supreme Court Justice Raoul Cantero has said that “some of the worst lawyering” he has ever seen has been in death penalty cases, where some counsel “have little or no experience.” In 2006, the American Bar Association reviewed Florida’s death penalty system, questioned its fairness and accuracy, and made 11 recommendations for reform. The Florida Supreme Court and the Florida bar have also urged a comprehensive review. None of this has happened, as Andrew Cohen points out in the Atlantic.
The Timely Justice Act also puts Florida out of step with the rest of the country. Nationally, the number of executions has been falling. California and North Carolina haven’t executed anyone since 2006. Illinois, Connecticut, and Maryland recently repealed their death penalties. Even Texas, the nation’s leader in executions, will have to slow down to fix problems with its law, according to a recent Supreme Court ruling.
Why does Florida want to go in the opposite direction? “Only God can judge,” Matt Gaetz, a Republican who sponsored the Timely Justice Act in the Florida House, has said. “But we sure can set up the meeting.” When I called Gaetz to discuss his bill further, he didn’t call me back. Neither did the bill’s sponsor in the state senate, Joe Negron. Another state senator who backed the bill, Rob Bradley, agreed to talk. He is a lawyer who says that people are sitting on death row too long. “Everybody realizes right now, that when a person is sentenced to death, it’s going to be 10, 20, 30, 40 years before they are executed,” Bradley says. “And so that erodes the public’s confidence, and it leaves the impression, rightly or wrongly, that the system is broken.”
I’d argue that having the highest rate of exonerations in the country might also erode the public’s confidence in the state’s system. And in fact, it’s not true that Florida is particularly slow to execute—the state’s average waiting time of 13.2 years is less than the national average of 14.8 years.
Bradley insists that the Timely Justice Act won’t make it quicker and easier to execute someone who is innocent. “What it does is it puts the condemned and his or her lawyers on notice that they need to, if they have claims of innocence, they need to gather them and present them to a competent court of law, and do so in a timely manner,” he said.
But there are a couple of problems with that argument. One is that evidence of innocence can surface years after a conviction. Courts move slowly on these cases for a reason: death is different, as the U.S. Supreme Court has said many times.
Take the case of Juan Melendez. He was on Florida’s death row for 16 years before a diligent defense investigator discovered a tape in the case files—a tape of another man confessing to the murder that no one had presented to the jury. Before the tape came out, the Florida Supreme Court rejected his appeals three times. If the Timely Justice Act had been in effect at the time, Melendez might easily have been executed. I found four more people like that when I looked up the records of Florida’s 24 exonerees. These men spent between 13 and 21 years on death row. It took time and a lot of work to undo the mistakes that initially doomed them.
And those mistakes were often made by their own lawyers. William Van Poyck’s trial lawyer did no investigation before the trial, digging up nothing that would give the jury a reason to spare his client’s life. And the lawyer on his first appeal reportedly admitted to being a cocaine addict, had previously been disbarred, and never spoke to Van Poyck or answered any of his letters.
Then there’s the case of Clemente Aguirre. He’s the man who may well become Florida’s 25th exoneree—and his case shows how prone to error Florida’s death penalty system still is.
In 2006, Aguirre was accused of murdering two of his neighbors, 47-year-old Cheryl Williams and her mother. The women lived next door to him in a trailer park. The crime was bloody and brutal: Williams was stabbed 129 times. Aguirre was a prep cook from Honduras who was in the United States illegally. At first, when police questioned him about the murders, Aguirre said he knew nothing. Then he went back to the police, on his own, and told them he’d discovered the bodies late on the night of the killings, when he went to Williams’ trailer to ask if she had any beer. (Williams had been dating one of Aguirre’s roommates.) Aguirre led the police to clothing and shoes he’d been wearing that night, which had the victims’ blood on it. He explained that when he opened the door of the trailer, he found Williams’ body and turned it over to see if she had a pulse. He hadn’t reported the killings, Aguirre said, because he was afraid he’d be deported.
Aguirre’s trial lawyer did little investigation and he never asked for DNA testing. The jury voted 7 to 5 to sentence him to death. Interviewed by a state psychiatrist in 2011, Aguirre said, through a translator, “They had the wrong man then, and they have the wrong guy now.” He continued: “DNA. DNA. DNA. Si.”
Aguirre was right. When his lawyers on appeal finally had DNA testing done, it showed no matches for Aguirre’s blood at the crime scene—and eight fresh bloodstains that matched the DNA profile of Cheryl Williams’ daughter. At a hearing last month, Aguirre’s lawyers presented this new evidence, along with the testimony of a friend of the daughter, who says the daughter told her that “demons are in her head and caused her to kill her family.” A police video also shows the daughter saying, “My family died from me.” Aguirre is now waiting for a ruling from the judge who heard the new evidence.
In theory, the Timely Justice Act tries to improve the quality of representation for death penalty defendants by providing more funding for it. But if you read the bill, you find that only about $400,000 has been allocated to reopen one office for defense lawyers in the northern part of the state. And this office won’t handle trials or even the first appeal. They come in only at the last stage.
If you really wanted to fix Florida’s death penalty system, you wouldn’t speed it up in a fit of frustration. You’d do the opposite. “Really what we need to do is pause,” says Stephen K. Harper, a longtime death penalty defense lawyer and the supervising attorney in the death penalty clinic at Florida International University’s law school. “Let’s step back, let’s consider the death penalty, from beginning through the end, and only then would we be able to come up with decent recommendations as to how to change it.”
An afterthought. You can Google the names of Fred Zane and Dr. Steve Hayne, but if you do, you will probably not sleep well tonight. There are more out there like them.
Oftentimes, the state, through its prosecutors, judges and elected officials seem terrified that somebody who has been convicted will be found to have been wrongly convicted. Groups such as the Innocence Project and even privately retained lawyers have had to fight to get DNA testing done. Even when DNA and other sophisticated tests show unequivocally the defendant did not do the crime, they still fight correcting the injustice tooth and nail.
Granted, the vast majority of persons convicted of crimes actually did do it, there are enough who were wrongly convicted to give one pause. Look at the number of death row inmates who have been cleared and released already. I am all too familiar with sloppy evidence gathering and lab tests that were never done. I was involved with the Fred Zain case in West Virgina. Fred was the police serologist who did not even bother to run the lab tests, but threw blood samples out and presented reports of his “test results” that were fabricated out of thin air. People went to prison because of his testimony.
After Fred Zain was totally discredited in West Virgina and investigated for perjury, he got a new job in another state doing the same thing. The state? Texas.
In Mississippi, the state liked to use pathologist Dr. Steve Hayne to do autopsies. Steve did one on a murdered college co-ed and even missed the fact the young woman was pregnant. Steve is the poster boy for rubber stamping autopsies and trying to pass speculation off as science.
What people like Rick Scott want to do is speed up the death penalty/execution process so defense investigators will have less time to look for, and find, wrongful convictions.
The US is a backward nation that is more intune with Taliban justice when it comes to the death penalty except US drags out the process awhile longer. When people justify the death penalty, they justify citizen sponsored murder, since many death row inhabitants have been found to be innocent.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2012/04/daily-chart-10 Seventeen states have abolished the death penalty.
Excellent posting….. Agree with all said…. Ryan, the former governor of Il on his way to a conviction of his own…. For corruption…. Placed a moratorium on the states death penalty….. If I recall he was scheduled for release July 2013……
Words cannot express how much this horrifies me. More later, after coffee.
The far right fringe that support the death penalty do not care if the accused is guilty as the verdict indicates. After all the person is guilty of some other crime that they got away with.
“However, until we decide to reject the efforts of a minority to impose Old Testament views on the justice system, we will continue to see this sort of legislative abomination.”
The death penalty has approximately 2:1 majority support.
http://www.gallup.com/poll/1606/death-penalty.aspx
Let me be the first to be irresponsible and say that the death penalty should be abolished.
It’s barbaric, unjust, ineffective, and extremely expensive.
Try apologizing to someone who’s been unjustly executed.
It has no deterrent effect. “Oh, hell, I flew into a rage and was about to kill you, but then I thought about 20 years on death row, and that stopped me,” said no one, ever.
Death row inmates, I believe, spend about 20 years on death row. They very frequently die of disease or old age.
Incredibly expensive, just to savor the righteous pleasure of revenge, by sentencing someone to death. Or to further one’s political career, by appealing to the electorate’s blood lust.
Now, Florida has a solution: kill ’em quick, before any exculpatory evidence surfaces. That’s so messy, don’t you think? Kill ’em quick, and there’s more time and money to kill more of ’em.
People that kill for the sake of killing being guiltless calling it good will want to have a millstone around his neck wanting to drown in boiling salt water like a lobster rather than burn in Gods glory.
People that kill for the sake of l killing being guiltless will want to have a millstone around his neck wanting to drown in boiling salt water like a lobster rather than burn in Gods glory.
i need to remember to refresh the page before posting
http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/some-examples-post-furman-botched-executions
Here’s some information on the cost of the death penalty versus the cost of lifetime incarceration in Florida:
http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/costs-death-penalty
Disturbing developments, Mike.
The death penalty is grossly overused, however it is necessary -the death penalty is a public safety issue and should be reserved for the most deviant child killers, & serial killers- it should not be used as an eye for an eye- but to say it should be outlawed is irresponsible – unfortunatly we live in a world where life in prison doesn’t mean life- how would like someone like David Westerfield living next door to you after he crisped and bashed in the teeth if a five year old girl??
I have learned, much to my deep sadness, never to be surprised by man’s inhumanity to man!
Governor Scott seems to know no mercy and is not interested in justice. It is chilling to behold.
Great article Mike. It is amazing that these humans are doing everything that they can to kill people before we can find out who really is guilty and who is innocent. How do they sleep at night?