"The armor of capital punishment is rotting away, revealing a ghoulish presence that has nothing to do with preventing crime. It is bloodlust, nothing more."
Thursday was a day of infamy at the Florida Supreme Court. Over one anguished dissent, five arch-conservative justices discarded a nearly 50-year-old precedent in order to approve more executions, not caring whether the prisoners actually deserve to die.
The justices renounced their duty to review death sentences for proportionality — that is, whether execution would be too severe in comparison to other cases.
The court adopted that policy in 1973 as its basis for upholding Florida’s new death penalty law, which had been enacted after the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1972 decision that capital punishment throughout the United States was arbitrary and capricious.
What Florida’s death court did Thursday belies the old promise to ensure consistency between who lives and who dies for similar crimes under similar circumstances. It sets Florida far apart from most of the other states that still execute people. And it demonstrates that capital punishment in Florida is beyond justification or repair and must be abolished.
The justices who took part in the travesty should be voted out of office, starting with Carlos Muñiz, the only one on Tuesday’s ballot.
The court made its ruling in its 50th consecutive rejection of an appeal from a death row inmate, in this case, Jonathan Huey Lawrence, 45, a murderer from Santa Rosa County.
The Legislature requires the court to review every death sentence. In 1973, the court took that to mean that it should consider more than just the usual fine points of law, that it should also consider proportionality across racial, sex, geographical lines, and the circumstances of each crime.
“No longer will one man die and another live on the basis of race, or a woman live and a man die on the basis of sex,” Justice James C. Adkins Jr., promised in the old majority opinion.
Largely because of that assurance, the U.S. Supreme Court let Florida resume executions. There have been 99 so far. However, dozens of other prisoners have been re-sentenced to life in consideration of disparities in sentencing.
In March 2014, however, the Florida court’s most conservative justices, Charles Canady and Ricky Polston, argued that proportionality review violates a 1998 amendment to the Florida Constitution that the Legislature intended to keep the death penalty from being overturned.
It requires Florida courts to interpret the U.S. Constitution’s provision against cruel or unusual punishment according to how the U.S. Supreme Court does. That court ruled in an appeal from another state that the U.S. Constitution doesn’t require proportionality review. So, said Canady and Polston, Florida must not practice it.
Canady and Polston were outvoted 5-2 on that occasion, but their dissent was an open invitation to the attorney general’s office to revisit the issue once enough justices were replaced by conservative appointees of Govs. Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis. Jorge Labarga is the only remaining moderate and the last voice of decency.
It was again his turn to dissent Thursday, as he had in three earlier decisions of the new majority that mean more death sentences will be carried out. He called the Lawrence decision “the most consequential step yet in dismantling the reasonable safeguards” in Florida’s death penalty law.
“I cannot overstate how quickly and consequentially the majority’s decisions have impacted death penalty law in Florida,” he wrote.
Labarga argued that even though the U.S. Supreme Court does not require proportionality review, it has never held it unconstitutional. Moreover, 15 of the other 25 death penalty states conduct proportionality review, including Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia.
In line with “evolving standards of decency,” Labarga said, Florida has “in many instances” given its citizens greater rights and protections than the minimum required by the U.S. Supreme Court. That, he mourned, “has been significantly, if not completely repudiated by this court’s various opinions” in recent death penalty cases.
The court’s 1973 promise of fairness was in one sense difficult to keep. For the court rarely, if ever, sees cases of murderers sentenced to life in prison because those cases end at the five district courts of appeal. But there are many lifers in Florida prisons whose crimes were more brutal than those committed by some on death row.
Among them: Clem Beauchamp, sentenced to three consecutive life sentences in Palm Beach County four years ago for the murders of his girlfriend and her two children, whose decomposing bodies were found in luggage dumped in a canal.
The Lawrence decision is all the more tragic because the last resort of executive clemency has become a dead letter in Florida. Not since 1985 has a Florida governor commuted a death sentence to life in prison.
Apart from Muñiz, Canady and Polston, the other death-dealing justices Thursday were Alan Lawson, a Scott appointee; and John Couriel, named recently by DeSantis. The governor’s newest justice, Jamie Grosshans, did not participate.
We had already recommended a vote against Muñiz’s retention as a way for the public to protest how DeSantis, and Scott before him, have made right-wing credentials, including membership in the Federalist Society, a litmus test for appointment to the bench.
The Lawrence decision is an insult to Florida’s sovereignty. The state’s highest court is taking what the U.S. Supreme Court never said as a pretext to invalidate a fail-safe provision against random cruelty in the application of society’s only irreversible punishment.
The armor of capital punishment is rotting away, revealing a ghoulish presence that has nothing to do with preventing crime. It is bloodlust, nothing more.
Source: sun-sentinel.com, Editorial Board, October 30, 2020. Editorials are the opinion of the Sun Sentinel Editorial Board and written by one of its members or a designee. The Editorial Board consists of Editorial Page Editor Rosemary O’Hara, Dan Sweeney, Steve Bousquet and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson.
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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde
