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Thread: Florida Capital Punishment News

  1. #371
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Mike's Avatar
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    There you go first you say you want a "True Conservative" then you say he is enough of a moderate.

    He's against freedom of speech, which is becoming a leftist staple. That is my number one issue with him.

    He says a lot of right wing things but his actions are an indication of something else.

    Hurst was a complete misinterpretation of what SCOTUS ruled, if Scott could've placed two more judges on that bench it never would've happened.
    Last edited by Mike; 02-08-2020 at 12:53 PM.
    "There is a point in the history of a society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly. Punishing somehow seems unfair to it, and it is certain that imagining ‘punishment’ and ‘being supposed to punish’ hurts it, arouses fear in it." Friedrich Nietzsche

  2. #372
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Neil's Avatar
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    Yes I want a true conservative Mike. I don’t think a hardcore conservative can win in the general in anymore. That’s why I mentioned him. He’s probably the only one who can get elected in 2024.

    Now that Hurst is destroyed. The judges in conservative counties are reinstating death sentences. In liberal counties, like where Okafor is, the judge declined. I’m dying to know what the total of Florida’s death row will be at the end of the year.

    Desantis should push for non unanimous rulings. I hate the senate president.

    https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.fox...urt-ruling.amp

  3. #373
    Administrator Helen's Avatar
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    Florida Supreme Court: Major death penalty ruling will not be revisted

    The Florida Supreme Court on Thursday refused to reconsider a ruling that said unanimous jury recommendations are not necessary before death sentences can be imposed.

    The court, in a 4-1 decision, rejected a request for a rehearing by attorneys for Death Row inmate Mark Anthony Poole. As is common, the decision did not explain the court’s reasoning.

    Chief Justice Charles Canady and justices Ricky Polston, Alan Lawson and Carlos Muniz were in the majority, while Justice Jorge Labarga supported granting a rehearing. The Supreme Court issued a ruling in January that said justices “got it wrong” in 2016 when they required changes such as unanimous jury recommendations on death sentences.

    The January decision reversing course reinstated a death sentence for Poole, who was convicted in Polk County in the 2001 first-degree murder of Noah Scott, the attempted murder and sexual battery of Loretta White, armed burglary and armed robbery.

    A jury in 2011 recommended by a vote of 11-1 that Poole should be sentenced to death --- a sentence that a judge imposed. But based on the Florida Supreme Court’s 2016 decision, Poole’s death sentence was later vacated because of the lack of a unanimous jury recommendation.

    In a filing in February opposing the request for a rehearing at the Supreme Court, Attorney General Ashley Moody’s office argued that unanimous jury recommendations are not required under the U.S. Constitution’s Eighth Amendment, which bars cruel and unusual punishment.

    The decisions this year came after a long, complicated series of issues that stemmed from a January 2016 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court in a case dubbed Hurst v. Florida. That ruling found the state’s death-penalty system was unconstitutional because it gave too much authority to judges, instead of juries, in imposing death sentences.

    The Florida Supreme Court in October 2016 interpreted and applied the U.S. Supreme Court ruling, including requiring unanimous jury recommendations.

    In 2017, the Legislature passed a law that required unanimous jury recommendations as it complied with the state Supreme Court ruling. That law remains in place.

    (source: fox35orlando.com)
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    “There are lots of extremely smug and self-satisfied people in what would be deemed lower down in society, who also deserve to be pulled up. In a proper free society, you should be allowed to make jokes about absolutely anything.”
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  4. #374
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Mike's Avatar
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    Florida justices reverse course on death row disabilities

    By Jim Saunders
    The Ledger

    Saying it made a “clear error” in 2016, the Florida Supreme Court on Thursday scrapped a decision that gave some Death Row inmates another chance to argue that they should be shielded from execution because they have intellectual disabilities.

    The ruling came a week after justices tossed out a decades-old legal standard about circumstantial evidence in criminal cases, with both opinions reflecting the court’s conservative shift since early last year — and its willingness to rip up old decisions.

    Thursday’s ruling came in an appeal by Death Row inmate Harry Franklin Phillips, who was convicted in the 1982 murder of a probation supervisor in Miami and who contends he should not be executed because of an intellectual disability. In 2008, the Supreme Court ruled that Phillips failed to meet legal tests to prove such a disability.

    But the U.S. Supreme Court in 2014, in a separate case, rejected part of Florida’s tests for determining whether defendants have intellectual disabilities. That part of the tests set a cutoff score of 70 on IQ exams. The U.S. Supreme Court said the state could not use such a “rigid rule.”

    The Florida Supreme Court in 2016 ruled that the U.S. Supreme Court decision should be applied retroactively, which could give longtime inmates such as Phillips another chance to prove they have intellectual disabilities and should be spared execution.

    Thursday’s 4-1 ruling, however, said that applying the decision retroactively was erroneous.

    The majority described the U.S. Supreme Court decision as an “evolutionary refinement” of procedures needed to comply with a constitutional ban on executing people with intellectual disabilities. As a result, it said the change did not need to be retroactively applied to inmates such as Phillips.

    “It (the U.S Supreme Court decision) merely clarified the manner in which courts are to determine whether a capital defendant is intellectually disabled and therefore ineligible for the death penalty,” said Thursday’s opinion shared by Chief Justice Charles Canady and justices Ricky Polston, Alan Lawson and Carlos Muniz. “It did not invalidate any statutory means for imposing the death sentence, nor did it prohibit the states from imposing the death penalty against any new category of persons. Before Walls (the 2016 ruling in a case known as Walls v. State), this court had been clear that evolutionary refinements do not apply retroactively.”

    But Justice Jorge Labarga wrote a sharply worded dissent, which he said sought to “underscore the unraveling of sound legal holdings in this most consequential area of the law.”

    “Yet again, this court has removed an important safeguard in maintaining the integrity of Florida’s death penalty jurisprudence,” Labarga wrote. “The result is an increased risk that certain individuals may be executed, even if they are intellectually disabled — a risk that this court mitigated just three years ago by holding that the decision in Hall v. Florida (the 2014 U.S. Supreme Court case) is to be retroactively applied.”

    Labarga was part of a five-member majority in the 2016 ruling on retroactivity, while Canady and Polston dissented. Lawson and Muniz were not on the court at the time. Two seats are currently vacant.

    But the Supreme Court has undergone a massive philosophical change since January 2019, when longtime justices Barbara Pariente, R. Fred Lewis and Peggy Quince were forced to step down because of a mandatory retirement age. Pariente, Lewis, Quince and Labarga were part of a generally liberal bloc that made up a majority of the court.

    Lawson’s appointment to replace former Justice James E.C. Perry in late 2016 created what was often a 4-3 split on the court. But that changed last year when Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis appointed Muniz, Robert Luck and Barbara Lagoa to replace Pariente, Lewis and Quince.

    While Luck and Lagoa have since become federal appellate judges, Muniz has combined with Canady, Polston and Lawson to create a solid conservative majority that has shown a willingness to overturn — or, in legal terms, “recede from” — earlier decisions by the court.

    Last week, over the objections of Labarga, the court rejected a longstanding legal standard used in criminal cases that only involve circumstantial evidence. The majority said the change would lead to Florida joining federal courts and most other states in how judges weigh such cases, but Labarga wrote that the move eliminated a “reasonable safeguard” in criminal cases.

    In Thursday’s decision, the majority pointed, in part, to the value of maintaining “finality” in Phillips’ case.

    “The surviving victims, society-at-large and the state all have a weighty interest in not having Phillips’ death sentence set aside for the relitigation of his claim of intellectual disability based on Hall’s evolutionary refinement in the law,” the majority wrote.

    But Labarga bristled at that reasoning.

    “In justifying its holding, the majority discusses the need for finality in the judicial process,” Labarga wrote. “I agree that finality is a fundamental component of a functioning judicial system. However, we simply cannot be blinded by an interest in finality when that interest leaves open the genuine possibility that an individual will be executed because he is not permitted consideration of his intellectual disability claim.”

    https://www.theledger.com/news/20200...w-disabilities
    "There is a point in the history of a society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly. Punishing somehow seems unfair to it, and it is certain that imagining ‘punishment’ and ‘being supposed to punish’ hurts it, arouses fear in it." Friedrich Nietzsche

  5. #375
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Mike's Avatar
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    Inmates say the coronavirus has hit Florida’s death row

    By Leonora LaPeter Anton
    Tampa Bay Times

    Two weeks ago, Tommy Zeigler typed in an email from Florida’s death row that he’d gotten food poisoning from chili. A day later, on Aug. 28, the 75-year-old wrote a supporter that he “was struggling trying to breathe.”

    This week, two of Zeigler’s neighbors on death row confirmed independently by email to the Tampa Bay Times that they had tested positive for COVID-19. Both said they heard Zeigler also has tested positive, though the Times has not been able to confirm that.

    Zeigler has been on death row for 44 years. For the past two decades, the state of Florida has turned down his requests for advanced DNA testing six times. He was convicted of killing his wife, in-laws and another man at his Winter Garden furniture store on Christmas Eve 1975.

    His hopes to clear his name hinge on the DNA testing, which may be supported by the new prosecutor likely to be elected in Orange County this November.

    Another death row inmate, Daniel Peterka, said Zeigler and John C. Marquard, the inmate on his other side, were taken to the prison hospital on Aug. 29. The pair has not returned.

    Marquard, on death row for killing a woman in St. Augustine in 1991, said in an email that he and Zeigler were both tested in the same room, more than 6 feet apart. There was only one bed open, Marquard said, so Zeigler was taken to UF Health Shands Hospital in Gainesville, because his symptoms were worse.

    Since then, Zeigler’s cousin, lawyers and friends have not been able to reach him, and he has not sent out any emails. A spokesman for UF Health Shands Hospital said Zeigler was not currently a patient there.

    Marquard said he heard Zeigler may have returned to an isolation unit in the prison.

    Union Correctional Institution, home to death row and located just outside Starke, has refused to disclose health information because Zeigler doesn’t have release forms on file, said Terry Hadley, his original trial attorney.

    Connie Crawford, Zeigler’s cousin and last remaining relative, said she called and spoke to the chaplain and a nurse, but neither could tell her anything.

    "I asked, 'Could you at least tell me if he’s breathing?’ and the nurse replied, ‘I can’t tell you anything,’ " Crawford said.

    Hadley said he prepared a health care form, giving Crawford access to Zeigler’s health information and sent it to the prison last week for Zeigler to sign. Still no word.

    The Florida Department of Corrections declined to discuss individual cases or the status of the prison wing that holds Florida’s more than 300 death row prisoners. To protect the identity of the prisoners, it is reporting information by institution only.

    As of Thursday, Union Correctional Institution, which can hold 2,172 male prisoners, had completed 1,794 COVID-19 tests on inmates. Ninety-seven prisoners and 44 staff members have tested positive.

    At Columbia Correctional Institution in Lake City, 1,338 inmates and 87 staff members have tested positive. The prison can hold 1,427 men. At Lowell Correctional Institution, a womens' prison in Ocala, 1,001 of the 2,165 inmates and 71 staff members have tested positive.

    The Department of Corrections reports its tests on an online dashboard that shows many prisons across the state struggling to contain COVID-19. The statewide prison system had 15,744 inmates and 2,813 employees who had tested positive. Of those, 12,678 inmates have been cleared from medical isolation by health professionals and returned to their housing units, and 2,193 staff members have returned to work.

    Death row prisoners contacted by the Times said multiple prisoners have come down with fevers and other symptoms.

    “The necessary precautions aren’t being taken,” said Ronald Wayne Clark Jr., convicted of killing a man who picked him up hitchhiking in 1990.

    Marquard said he has been moved back to a cell near others who are in quarantine. He said he needed 2 liters of oxygen initially but was asymptomatic by the time he received his positive test result on Sept. 4.

    Peterka, on death row for killing a roommate in 1989, said that after Zeigler and Marquard left, the staff tested the entire floor. On Sept. 8, the results came back. Eleven of the 12, including himself, tested positive.

    “Between the guards touching everything and everyone without changing gloves, the close quarters and the commingling on the rec yards,” Peterka said, via email, "the surprise would be if it didn’t spread once it got in here.”

    Peterka said he filed a grievance two months ago. In it, he observed that Union Correctional Institution had positive cases already and guards should use fresh gloves and avoid “hands-on custodial escorts." He said the staff had refused.

    He said he received a reply a month later, on July 31, which said that “hands-on custodial contact” would continue and that proper personal protection equipment was being used.

    He said many on his floor either have or have had fevers and other symptoms associated with COVID-19 but nothing that he would consider “severe.”

    On Thursday, Peterka wrote that he heard from a nurse who said Zeigler was off supplemental oxygen and ready to return to his regular dorm.

    Statewide, the Department of Corrections has reported 117 deaths due to COVID-19. Union Correctional has reported two deaths.

    Lynn-Marie Carty-Wallace, Zeigler’s private investigator, urged prisons to find a way to connect inmates with loved ones.

    “This is a very unusual situation,” she said. “Can’t they have one person whose job it is to help inmates connect with one loved one? If there was, everyone would feel a lot better.”

    https://www.tampabay.com/news/health...tommy-zeigler/
    "There is a point in the history of a society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly. Punishing somehow seems unfair to it, and it is certain that imagining ‘punishment’ and ‘being supposed to punish’ hurts it, arouses fear in it." Friedrich Nietzsche

  6. #376
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Mike's Avatar
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    After justices flip flop, some notorious Miami killers may be bound for Death Row again

    BY DAVID OVALLE
    The Miami Herald

    Prosecutors are asking a judge to return to Death Row the man who used a shotgun to fatally beat University of Miami football player Marlin Barnes in 1996.

    The request marks the first time the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office has sought to reinstate the death penalty on a former Death Row inmate since a controversial Florida Supreme Court decision in January determined that jurors do not need to be unanimous in meting out execution as punishment.

    Labrant Dennis, 48, is now the latest of about 100 convicted murderers who had their death sentences overturned over the past four years thanks to a series of rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court and Florida Supreme Court. They now face a possible return to Death Row amid further legal fights.

    The Florida Supreme Court, which has shifted significantly more conservative under Gov. Ron DeSantis, will ultimately decide in the coming months whether inmates such as Dennis should have their death sentences reinstated. Over the summer, justices heard arguments over whether two other former Death Row inmates, Bessman Okafor and Michael James Jackson, should have their death sentences reinstated.

    “It’s a big decision — 100 people’s lives will be impacted,” said Hannah Gorman, the director of Florida Center for Capital Representation at Florida International University’s College of Law, which tracks the state’s death-penalty cases.

    In a court document filed last week, Miami-Dade prosecutors say Dennis is no longer entitled to a new sentencing hearing — which would require the swearing in of jurors to reconsider evidence of the crimes — because of the Florida Supreme Court’s decision in January.

    “In addition to the incalculable emotional toll on victims’ family members, it would be an enormous waste of both the bench and bars’ time, as well as citizens’ time who are called for jury duty to require new penalty phases,” wrote Miami-Dade Assistant State Attorney Christine Zahralban, the head of the legal unit.

    For decades, Florida was considered an outlier, one of of the few states that did not require a jury to decide unanimously on sentencing someone to die for a capital offense. Jurors issued bare majority “advisory” recommendations. Judges were the ones to impose the death penalty.

    But then came the case of Timothy Lee Hurst, who murdered a Pensacola fast-food restaurant worker. In January 2016, the U.S. Supreme Court declared the state’s death-penalty sentencing system was unconstitutional because it gave too little power to juries.

    Florida lawmakers responded by rewriting the state law, replacing the judge’s override and requiring a vote of at least 10 of 12 jurors to sentence someone to death. But the Florida Supreme Court later ruled that the new law was unconstitutional because jury verdicts need to be unanimous, and that Hurst was entitled to a new sentencing hearing.

    The Florida Legislature eventually passed a law mandating that unanimous juries were needed to give out a death sentence — a law that still stands now. (Major criminal trials have been largely paused because of the coronavirus pandemic, but for all current defendants facing the death penalty, jurors must be unanimous in deciding on death.)

    The state’s high court also ruled that the Hurst decision will apply to most cases completed after 2002 — in all, at least 151 Death Row inmates were entitled to new sentencing hearings.

    Since 2016, 37 former Death Row inmates in Florida wound up getting new sentences of life in prison, according to FIU’s Center for Capital Representation. That includes Victor Guzman, who was sentenced to life in prison for the brutal stabbing murder of 80-year-old Severina Dolores Fernandez in Little Havana in 2000.

    Another eight Florida inmates again received the death penalty.

    There remain about 100 ex-Death Row inmates whose death sentences had been vacated, and were awaiting new sentencing hearings, according to the representation center.

    Then, in January, a newly constituted Florida Supreme Court issued a decision in Poole v. Florida that stunned legal observers. The court backtracked on its 2016 decision in Hurst — saying it had “erred” three years earlier in ruling that juries had to be unanimous to deliver the death penalty.

    Opponents of the death penalty, and many legal scholars, criticized the decision as a flagrant violation of legal precedent. “They are playing fast and loose with the law and fundamentally undermining the confidence of the public in the Court’s decisions,” said Stephen Harper, a former Miami-Dade assistant public defender who recently retired as the director of the FIU center.

    Suddenly, inmates who had returned to local jails to await new sentencing hearings were unsure of what would happen.

    That includes inmates such as Joel Lebron, who was part of a group of young men who kidnapped 18-year-old Ana Maria Angel and her boyfriend from South Beach. Lebron and the others slit the boyfriend’s throat, leaving him to die, and gang-raped Angel before Lebron shot her to death as she begged for her life on the side of Interstate 95 in Palm Beach County.

    By a vote of 9-3, a jury recommended Lebron be put to death. A Miami-Dade judge agreed and sentenced him to die, before his sentence was overturned because of Hurst.

    Another high profile case is that of Noel Doorbal and Daniel Lugo, two Miami bodybuilders convicted of the kidnapping and grisly dismemberment murders of businessman Frank Griga and his girlfriend, Krisztina Furton. The saga was later made into “Pain and Gain,” starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, a movie that angered the families of the murder victims.

    Doorbal and Lugo, originally sentenced to death, are now in a Miami-Dade jail waiting to see if they will indeed get new sentencing hearings.

    In Dennis’ case, he was convicted in the 1996 murders of UM linebacker Barnes and his friend, Timwanika Lumpkins, in a campus apartment. Prosecutors said Dennis, Lumpkins’ former boyfriend, savagely beat them to death with a shotgun barrel in a jealous rage.

    By a vote of 11-1, the jury voted to give Dennis the death penalty.

    After Hurst, the Florida Supreme Court in July 2017 overturned Dennis’ death penalty. But after the court backtracked in Poole v. Florida, prosecutors said Dennis is not entitled to a new sentencing.

    The reasons: Jurors also unanimously convicted Dennis of additional felonies, including burglary with assault or battery while armed and another murder count. Those convictions count as a “statutory aggravating circumstance” required to mete out the death penalty, according to a motion filed by the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office.

    “It would truly be a miscarriage of justice to require the State and the victims’ family to go through another sentencing when it is apparent that defendant’s sentence is entirely legal, appropriate and the trial court agreed,” prosecutor Zahralban wrote.

    Across the state, judges have reinstated the death penalty for at least 10 inmates, according to the FIU center. Six of those are from the Fourth Judicial Circuit, which includes Duval, Nassau and Clay counties, long considered one of the most aggressive regions in pursuing the death penalty.

    One of those inmates is James Belcher, who was sentenced to die for strangling 29-year-old Jennifer Embry in Duval County in 1996.

    In Broward County, prosecutors are asking for the reinstatement of the death penalty for Howard Steven Ault for the murder of two young children, one them whom he raped, in 1996.

    Robert Dunham, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, a non-profit that analyzes capital litigation policy, stressed that no one has been returned to Death Row yet because the Florida Supreme Court has yet to decide on the fate of the 100 or so inmates.

    He said he believes the Florida Supreme Court would be again discarding legal precedent if it reimposes the death sentences.

    “No one yet has had a resentencing hearing taken away from them, and reimposed death sentences upheld by the Florida Supreme Court,” he said, adding: “It’s important to note this is court-created chaos.”

    https://www.miamiherald.com/news/loc...246553293.html
    "There is a point in the history of a society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly. Punishing somehow seems unfair to it, and it is certain that imagining ‘punishment’ and ‘being supposed to punish’ hurts it, arouses fear in it." Friedrich Nietzsche

  7. #377
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Neil's Avatar
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    It would be glorious to see them all go back to death row. I for one would love to see those 37 people somehow returned but that’s going to be the least likely of this case.

  8. #378
    Administrator Helen's Avatar
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    ‘An Earthquake in Florida’s Criminal Justice System’: Conservatives on Florida Supreme Court Overturn Decades-Old Death Penalty Precedent

    By Jerry Lambe
    msn.com

    The Republican-appointed justices on Florida’s Supreme Court overturned a nearly 50-year-old precedent on Thursday that required the court to ensure the proportionality of the death sentence when compared with other cases.

    In a 5-1 vote, the court reasoned that the 2002 addition of the Conformity Clause to the state’s constitution rendered the court’s mandatory proportionality review precedent “erroneous,” saying it “must yield to our constitution.” The clause provided that the prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment “shall be construed in conformity with decisions of the United States Supreme Court which interpret the prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment provided in the Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution.”

    According to the ruling, because the U.S. Supreme Court has held that comparative proportionality review of death sentences is not required by the Eighth Amendment, it cannot be required under Florida’s constitution.

    “The only legitimate state-law source for comparative proportionality review was the prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment found in article I, section 17 of the Florida Constitution—before the conformity clause was added to that provision in 2002,” the order stated. “Post-conformity clause, we have wrongly continued to enforce a state-law requirement for comparative proportionality review and have wrongly written this requirement into our procedural rules governing the scope of our appellate review.”

    The order also derided the Court’s past decisions which upheld the mandatory review based on precedent following the addition of the Conformity Clause, saying the justices never should allowed the practice to continue.

    “We cannot judicially rewrite our state statutes or constitution to require a comparative proportionality review that their text does not,” the order stated. “Nor can we ignore our constitutional obligation to conform our precedent respecting the Florida Constitution’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment to the Supreme Court’s Eighth Amendment precedent by requiring a comparative proportionality review that the Supreme Court has held the Eighth Amendment does not.”

    Justice Jorge Labarga, Democrats’ lone appointee on the court, filed a sharply worded dissent, accusing the majority of “dismantling reasonable safeguards” by eliminating a fundamental component of its capital punishment jurisprudence.

    “Now today, the majority jettisons a nearly fifty-year-old pillar of our mandatory review in direct appeal cases. As a result, no longer is this Court required to review death sentences for proportionality,” Labarga wrote. “I could not dissent more strongly to this decision, one that severely undermines the reliability of this Court’s decisions on direct appeal, and more broadly, Florida’s death penalty jurisprudence.”

    Labarga also criticized the majority’s reasoning, arguing proportionality review was “entirely consistent” with the Eighth Amendment and U.S. Supreme Court precedent.

    “I disagree with the majority’s reasoning that because the Supreme Court does not expressly mandate proportionality review, Florida’s conformity clause forbids it,” he wrote. “The Supreme Court recognized proportionality review as an ‘additional safeguard’ against the very thing the Eighth Amendment prohibits— arbitrarily imposed death sentences.

    Earlier this year, the Florida Supreme Court also reversed a 2016 ruling to allow juries to impose the death penalty without unanimous consent. The decision made Florida only the second state to allow non-unanimous death sentence verdicts, along with Alabama.

    Slate legal writer Mark Joseph Stern, for one, called the ruling an “earthquake in Florida’s criminal justice system.”

    Read the full decision below:

    FL SC Death Penalty Order by Law & Crime on Scribd

    https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime...nt/ar-BB1awfXX
    "I realize this may sound harsh, but as a father and former lawman, I really don't care if it's by lethal injection, by the electric chair, firing squad, hanging, the guillotine or being fed to the lions."
    - Oklahoma Rep. Mike Christian

    "There are some people who just do not deserve to live,"
    - Rev. Richard Hawke

    “There are lots of extremely smug and self-satisfied people in what would be deemed lower down in society, who also deserve to be pulled up. In a proper free society, you should be allowed to make jokes about absolutely anything.”
    - Rowan Atkinson

  9. #379
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Mike's Avatar
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    Florida Supreme Court won't reinstate death penalty for killers once sentenced to execution

    By David Ovalle
    The Miami Herald

    The Florida Supreme Court won’t be returning dozens of convicted murderers to Death Row.

    In two decisions on Wednesday that clarified months of confusion, justices said they did not have the legal authority to reinstate the death penalty for the killers who had previously been on Death Row, but had sentences tossed out because of legal questions over whether juries must be unanimous in meting out the ultimate punishment.

    In one of the cases, against convicted Orange County murderer Bessman Okafor, the Supreme Court said it could not “lawfully reinstate that sentence” and he deserved a new sentencing hearing. The rulings could affect more than 100 former Death Row inmates who remain convicted of murder, but have been awaiting new sentencing hearings.

    “We acknowledge the burden that resentencing proceedings will place on the victims of Okafor’s crimes,” the court ruled in a unanimous decision. “We also acknowledge the consequences for the victims in similar cases that will be governed by our decision here. Nonetheless, our holding is compelled by applicable law.”

    Critics of the death penalty hailed Wednesday’s decision, even though the Florida Supreme Court earlier this year flip-flopped and decided juries didn’t always need to be unanimous in sentencing someone to die for murder.

    Wednesday’s rulings cleared up some questions, starting with the big one: Ex-Death Row inmates won’t be automatically getting sent back to face execution. And it won’t affect future capital cases. Florida law, for now, has since been changed to require unanimous jury verdicts for a death sentence.

    “Finally, the Florida Supreme Court gives us a good decision,” said Hannah Gorman, who heads the Florida Center for Capital Representation at Florida International University’s College of Law. “One hundred lives now have a shot at a fair penalty trial.”

    In Florida, a 12-person jury listens to evidence and decides whether to sentence someone to die, or give them life in prison. In Miami-Dade, Wednesday’s rulings mean that some of the county’s most notorious killers will indeed have a chance to try to convince a jury to spare their lives.

    Among them: Labrant Dennis, who fatally beat to death University of Miami player Marlon Barnes in 1996; Joel Lebron, the ringleader of a group that kidnapped 18-year-old Ana Maria Angel, raping her and shooting her execution-style in 2002; and Noel Doorbal and Daniel Lugo, two Miami bodybuilders convicted of the kidnapping and grisly dismemberment murders of businessman Frank Griga and his girlfriend, Krisztina Furton.

    The rulings add yet another twist to the years-long legal saga over whether Florida juries must be unanimous in meting out the death sentence.

    For decades, Florida was one of the few states that did not require a jury to decide unanimously on sentencing someone to die for a capital offense. Jurors issued bare majority “advisory” recommendations, with judges imposing execution as a sentence.

    But in January 2016, the U.S. Supreme Court declared the state’s death-penalty sentencing system was unconstitutional because it gave too little power to juries. The Florida Supreme followed up later that year by ruling that jury verdicts need to be unanimous — a decision that overturned the death sentences for at least 151 Death Row inmates.

    Since then, nearly 40 convicted killers wound up getting life prison sentences, and eight got sent back to Death Row after new sentencing hearings presided over by juries, according to FIU’s Center for Capital Representation.

    But then in January, in a decision that shocked critics of capital punishment, a more conservative Florida Supreme Court said it had “erred” three years earlier and that juries don’t always need to be unanimous in sentencing someone to die. The backtrack meant inmates who had returned to local jails to await new sentencing hearings were unsure of what would happen.

    Across Florida, state attorneys sought to send some of the inmates back to Florida State Prison to await execution, as legal fights continued. On Wednesday, justices decided that even though the court had mostly backtracked on the jury unanimity, it did not have legal authority to reimpose the death sentences.

    https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime...on/ar-BB1bmlmb

    The order for Okafor can be found here: https://www.floridasupremecourt.org/...n/sc20-323.pdf
    "There is a point in the history of a society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly. Punishing somehow seems unfair to it, and it is certain that imagining ‘punishment’ and ‘being supposed to punish’ hurts it, arouses fear in it." Friedrich Nietzsche

  10. #380
    Moderator Bobsicles's Avatar
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    They will be in big trouble if they commute Paul Durousseau
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    Hear me, my chiefs! I am tired. My heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever. - Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt

    I’m going to the ghost McDonalds - Garcello

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