Mark Weisenmiller

TAMPA, Florida, Sep 26 2006 (IPS) — An influential lawyer’s group in the United States has strongly criticised Florida’s death penalty system, calling it ambiguous and secretive.

The American Bar Association (ABA) Death Penalty Moratorium Project also stated in a detailed, 450-page report that Florida has the highest number – 22 – of innocent death row prisoners who have been exonerated since 1973.

That alarming number prompted the ABA to study Florida’s justice system first. It eventually plans a review of 16 states in all. The report, funded by the influential law association and the European Union, identified 11 problem areas in total. Among its findings:

·The state of Florida did not provide adequate legal counsel to its poor prisoners after they have been convicted.

·Florida is the only U.S. state which does not require juries to vote unanimously on capital punishment cases.

·The southern state shows a racial disparity, making a non-white far more likely to be sentenced to death for killing a white victim than a white prisoner to be convicted for killing a person of colour.

·Florida has a high number of inmates – an estimated 50 percent – with severe mental disabilities on death row. Some of them, the report stated, were disabled at the time of the offence; others became ill after conviction and sentencing.

·Florida’s clemency process is full of “ambiguity and secrecy.”

The ABA issued its report four days before Florida executed Clarence Hill, 48, the inmate who sought to block his death in an appeal to the US Supreme Court in January. Hill’s death was the first execution in Florida in 2006. Moreover, the state this week has set Oct. 25 as an execution date for Denny Rolling, who was found guilty of murdering five college students 16 years ago.

“The people in charge of the death penalty have made mistakes. No one likes to admit that they made a mistake and the ABA report shows that. There’s no accountability in the (state’s death penalty) system,” Mark Elliott, spokesman for the anti-capital punishment organisation Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty told IPS.

The ABA panel reviewed previous death penalty studies, including one by the state’s own Supreme Court, and concluded that defendants convicted of killing whites are more likely to receive death sentences that those found guilty of murdering a non-white.

None of the 60 prisoners executed by the state of Florida since 1979, when the state re-instated capital punishment, have been white defendants found guilty of killing a black victim. A 2003 Amnesty International report found that even though blacks and whites are murder victims in nearly equal numbers in the U.S., some 80 percent of inmates executed since 1973 have been killed for murders involving white victims.

In 2000, Gov. John Ellis “Jeb” Bush appointed a commission to investigate racial bias among the state’s death row inmates. Then-Florida Attorney General Charlie Crist, who currently is running for Governor in the November elections, “did nothing with the commission’s report. He kept things at status quo,” Mark Schlakman, director of the Centre for the Advancement of Human Rights at Florida State University and a member of the panel told IPS.

The first of four key recommendations by the ABA, then, is the creation of two commissions independent of each other. One committee would specialise in studying the underlying causes of wrongful convictions in death penalty cases. The other would be comprised of a panel of judges that would review claims of factual innocence in existing cases.

The 22 Florida death row inmates exonerated so far have served a total of 150 years in prison for crimes they did not commit, Christopher Slobogin, a University of Florida law professor who led the eight-member team told IPS.

The ABA panel also recommended that Florida eliminate its statutory lawyer fee of $3,500 which must be paid by the defendant.. Instead, the state should allow for greater options in obtaining payments for services rendered. Moreover it wants state-appointed attorneys to meet minimum nationally-recognised requirements for lawyers defending death row prisoners.

Moreover, the state must immediately require a jury’s capital punishment verdict to be unanimous and must drop a law that allows judges to overrule a jury decision, the panel recommended. In 2005, a state Supreme Court Justice urged the Florida legislature to amend its law requiring unanimity, saying Florida’s death penalty rules could be open to attack. That bill did not pass.

One recommendation that Slobogin said could be implemented quickly is that the jury instructions by judges presiding over capital punishment cases should be uniform throughout Florida.

“It’s important to know that our report does not come out for or against the death penalty,” Slobogin told IPS. “Our point was to bring out the concerns and needs and some problems with the death penalty in Florida with some recommendations to address these issues.”

The ABA panel was comprised of death penalty opponents as well as supporters and included a circuit judge, a state attorney, a former Florida Supreme Court justice and a former public defender.

“The composition of the team was important,” Schlakman said, because the panel wanted to include all perspectives. It is believed to be the first comprehensive and impartial study of the death penalty as it is operated in Florida.

State officials said they would study the report, but have not yet promised to implement the changes.

“We’re looking at the report…but I believe that the death penalty process here (in Florida) is protected by an appeals process that is extensive. It can go on for ten years,” Gov. Bush told reporters.

It is doubtful that Gov. Bush will implement the recommendations in the report, as he will be leaving office, due to term limits, after this November’s election. That job will fall to either Jim Davis of Tampa, the Democratic candidate for Governor, or Crist, the Republican candidate for Governor.

In the past, Crist has urged the legislature not to make any changes in the law because it might weaken it. He has called the state’s current regulations necessary in order to “deter potential future murderers.”

Still, Elliott, the death penalty opponent, added that the report “should be a wake-up call for both Governor Bush and whoever the new Governor will be to start to listen to people who have various viewpoints about the death penalty.”

“It’s a non-partisan problem, no matter if a Democrat or Republican is Governor, for not investigating problems that have long been in the system,” he added.