Editorial Roundup: Florida
South Florida Sun Sentinel. July 14, 2023.
Editorial: Merciless Florida makes death penalty more likely
Florida’s death penalty law, enacted in 1972 to satisfy the U.S. Supreme Court’s objections to arbitrariness, capriciousness and racism, still left much to interpretation.
Upholding the law a year later, the Florida Supreme Court made promises that would prove difficult to keep. The court has now disgracefully repudiated what was left of them.
Voting 5 to 1, the court renounced its own policy to review and reduce death sentences that were excessive compared to how co-defendants were judged.
The majority said it had already done so, in effect, when it decided three years ago to forsake comparing new death sentences to others it had approved or reduced, a practice known as proportionality review.
The court’s dubious excuse was that because the U.S. Supreme Court does not require proportionality review, the Florida Constitution forbids Florida from practicing it.
Failure, 50 years later
Taken together, the decisions give the lie to what Justice James C. Adkins Jr. famously — and fatuously — promised in the 1973 majority decision.
Review by the court, he wrote, would limit the death sentence to only “the most aggravated and unmitigated of most serious crimes.” The sentencing process would become “a matter of reasoned judgment rather than an exercise in discretion at all.”
Although it never quite lived up to that, the court tried. But that was before three liberal justices had to retire four years ago and Gov. Ron DeSantis replaced them with conservatives seemingly chosen for how bloodthirsty they would be.
With 293 prisoners on death row and DeSantis having resumed executions at the rate of one a month, Florida presents a merciless face to a civilized world where capital punishment has long been on the wane. The U.S. Supreme Court, which has yet to review Florida’s law in its present version, should not uphold what is now the nation’s most death-oriented regime.
DeSantis’ new law, allowing death sentences if as few as eight of 12 jurors recommend them, will pick up the pace, even as the court has willfully rendered itself powerless to review them for fairness or the lack of it.
That is particularly savage because of the well-known fact that plea bargaining often results in life sentences for some killers while co-defendants who insist on their right to trial are sent to death row. The smarter ones, who may be the instigators, know that being the first to cop a plea can make the difference between life and death.
‘The law should be the same’
Moreover, the discretion left to prosecutors, juries and judges puts intense pressure on defendants to plead guilty even when they’re not.
These issues suffused one of the first cases in which the court weighed relative culpability.
In 1975, the court reduced Darius Slater’s death sentence for an Orlando robbery-murder because the actual trigger man, Charlie Ware, had pleaded no contest to killing a motel manager and was sentenced to life. Resentenced to life, Slater served 29 years before being paroled.
“We pride ourselves in a system of justice that requires equality before the law,” wrote Justice Ben Overton in the 5-2 majority opinion. “Defendants should not be treated differently upon the same or similar facts. When the facts are the same, the law should be the same. The imposition of the death sentence in this case is clearly not equal justice under the law.”
Adkins, whose opinion upheld the law, agreed.
John Crews, a North Florida circuit judge filling in for one of the other justices, agreed and went further. Affirming Slater’s sentence, he wrote, would have an “impermissible ‘chilling effect’” on a defendant’s right to go to trial.
It would also “inevitably weaken the learned opinion of Mr. Chief Justice Adkins sustaining the constitutionality of Florida’s death penalty statutes,” Crews added.
The court has now done just that.
What Adkins wrote in 1973 clearly influenced the U.S. Supreme Court to uphold Florida’s law. That decision, in 1976, spoke of the Florida court’s commitment to “assure consistency, fairness and rationality in the evenhanded operation of the state law.”
That is no longer true of the original law and it is even less so now that the Florida court is the most death-prone in the nation. Before abandoning proportionality and culpability review, it receded from its 2017 decision requiring unanimous jury recommendation for death sentences, enabling DeSantis to demand and the Legislature to enact the present 8-4 minimum this year.
Prosecutors and judges around the state are beginning to apply it to defendants whose crimes predate it. That retroactivity is wrong, but Attorney General Ashley Moody seems to anticipate that the court will approve it. After the court stayed a Wakulla County proceeding against two men, Moody told the court it should let the case go on and rule on retroactivity only once someone is sentenced to death.
Cruz v. State
In its latest decision, the majority said that the life sentence a jury gave to co-defendant Justen Charles is “irrelevant to and has no bearing” on the death sentence for Christian Cruz for the same crime, even as it acknowledged many decisions where relative culpability mattered.
Cruz and Charles were convicted separately of kidnapping and murdering Christopher Jemery in Deltona in Seminole County 10 years ago.
Dissenting as he often does, Justice Jorge Labarga insisted, rightly so, that comparisons are “consistent with the Eighth Amendment prohibition of arbitrary death sentences.”
“Surely,” Labarga added, “in a state that leads the nation with 30 exonerations of individuals from death row, every reasonable safeguard should be retained in this court’s toolkit when reviewing death sentences to ensure that the death penalty is reserved for the most aggravated and least mitigated of murders.”
But Florida’s high court no longer cares.
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Tampa Bay Times. July 17, 2023.
Editorial: On higher education, remember that Gov. DeSantis’ laws will outlast him ' Editorial
Amid fears of a brain drain, keeping Florida’s #1 rank in higher education should not be about murmurs and mood. It should focus on the effect of laws on the books.
Amid the growing but anecdotal evidence that Florida’s new laws might be chasing university faculty away lies a real, deeper concern. Because incontrovertible proof is hard to come by, people can argue about how real the effects are. But they can’t dismiss an important reality, one that hasn’t been central to this debate so far. From the Stop Woke Act to making it harder for faculty to retain tenure, each change risks corroding the integrity of Florida’s highly ranked higher education system. Like a slowly rusting water pipe, the damage may not be noticeable next week or next year, but it’s there — and will be expensive to fix.
That’s the real problem. Each one of these actions by Gov. Ron DeSantis and his captive Republican Legislature don’t just reflect their beliefs and their policies; they are the law of the land in Florida — and could remain so long after DeSantis has left the Governor’s Mansion. The worst may not even come on his watch. Floridians will be left to pick up the pieces and rewrite the laws, or the problems will only get worse.
In May, when DeSantis signed the ban on funding DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) programs, he said that: “Florida has ranked No. 1 in higher education for seven years in a row, and by signing this legislation we are ensuring that Florida’s institutions encourage diversity of thought, civil discourse and the pursuit of truth for generations to come. Florida is taking a stand for empowering students, parents and educators to focus on creating opportunities for our younger generations. I am happy to have worked with the Legislature to get this important legislation signed, sealed and delivered.”
Floridians who care about higher education should mark the governor’s words, particularly this phrase: “for generations to come.” It is true that U.S. News & World Report again has Florida No. 1 in higher education. It’s also a fact that the University of Florida, now ranked within the Top 5 public universities in the country, worked for years to gain that distinction. But reputations and rankings that take years or decades to nurture and carefully build can also wither away. And once they are lost, the hard work that went into acquiring them has to start again.
It’s hard to see how any of the recent laws will help boost those rankings or, in fact, to sustain where they are now. Will 2021′s Intellectual Freedom and Viewpoint Diversity Act, which encouraged lawsuits to ensure students’ “expressive rights” at colleges, in any way help to keep Florida No. 1 in higher education? That law allows students to record class lectures as evidence. How will that kind of intimidation help to keep rankings high?
Same for the Stop Woke Act, which banned universities from promoting concepts that make anyone feel “guilt, anguish or other psychological distress” related to race, color, national origin or sex because of actions “committed in the past.” The list of these new laws goes on.
In sum, they chill intellectual inquiry and frank, open classroom discussions and leave some topics — critical race theory, for one — virtually unmentionable. These are not the hallmarks of a great system of higher education. And, yet, they are the law in Florida and will remain so until the Legislature — some future Legislature — changes them.
Whatever people think of DeSantis and the manner in which he has fundamentally altered the arc of higher education in Florida, they should remember that, through the laws he has signed, his views will rule the educational landscape long after his term ends unless and until they are struck from the statutes. People may dismiss the anecdotes about trouble brewing for higher education in Florida, but the laws on the books are quite real, as will be their effects. Forward-looking Floridians and the Legislature that they elect should not wait for Florida’s sky-high university rankings to collapse to understand this fact and to act to change it.
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Miami Herald. July 18, 2023.
Editorial: DeSantis’ dangerous personal army is in turmoil. Let’s hope it stays that way
Well, that didn’t take long.
A little more than a year after Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced he was activating the state guard for the first time in 75 years — a move that had government overreach written all over it — the civilian volunteer force is fast becoming an embarrassing mess at best and a powerful personal militia at worst.
An organization that started out with a non-military disaster-response mission has expanded into a group that can be deployed to protect “ people and borders from illegal aliens and civil unrest. ” Some recruits are dropping out because the training is more militaristic than they expected. The state is looking for the program’s third leader in eight months. Recent stories by the Miami Herald/Tampa Bay Times and The New York Times documented the disarray and tensions.
Far from being a FEMA-style group, the new force is being trained by the state’s National Guard in a shortened and looser — some critics have called it slapdash — form of boot camp, with camouflage uniforms, shaved facial hair, rappelling with ropes, woodland navigation with a compass and military-style command. When the first class of recruits graduated in June, DeSantis issued a congratulatory press release calling them “soldiers.”
Roughed up
During training in June at Camp Blanding, the National Guard base near Jacksonville, a disabled retired Marine Corps captain who volunteered for the force reported to police that he was battered by Florida National Guard instructors who shoved him into a van after he questioned the program and its leadership.
Another former member, Brian Newhouse, a retired 20-year Navy veteran who was chosen to lead one of the State Guard’s three divisions, told the Miami Herald that the original idea for the force got “hijacked and turned into something that we were trying to stay away from: a militia.”
The idea started out more benignly, as power grabs usually do, dressed up in 2021 as mere assistance to the overworked Florida National Guard. In just a couple of years, it has grown from a proposal for 200 volunteers to more than 1,500 people, with a $108 million budget and planes and boats available to deploy.
DeSantis said thousands had applied. Of the 150 accepted, 120 graduated.
And the mission? In 2022, lawmakers said the guard was for emergencies and couldn’t operate outside the state. Those requirements were dropped a year later. Add to that the fact that the Florida Guard reports directly to DeSantis and only to DeSantis, and you have the makings of a very dangerous situation in the Sunshine State.
The leaders of the organization told the Times that a military-style organization makes sense — it can coordinate easily with the National Guard. And calling the group’s members soldiers is just tradition, going back to the way the guard was formed during World War II. The Florida guard, though, was disbanded in 1947, once the threat of war was over.
On our dime
This isn’t about a real threat. It’s fear-mongering. It’s designed to pump up anti-immigration sentiment and take a swipe at President Biden. It’s about one man’s goal to become president. It’s about duping taxpayers into paying for it all.
Maybe the chaos, then, is actually a blessing. If this state guard — with what sounds like an increasingly militaristic bent — were to get fully organized, it could easily become what we have feared from the start: a personal army for DeSantis. State power is already being abused here, in the so-called free state of Florida, to squelch dissent and free speech and target vulnerable groups.
How much worse could it become with a DeSantis Army at the ready?
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Orlando Sentinel. July 18, 2023.
Editorial: In DeSantis’ Florida, obsession with LGBTQ Floridians keeps hitting new lows
By now, most Floridians get it: The DeSantis administration is obsessed with targeting the LGBTQ community in Florida dishonestly, irrationally and repetitively across multiple venues.
The latest salvos will be fired on Wednesday, when the state Board of Education takes up a group of proposals that would once again drag Florida educators down the path of persecution. Sooner or later, local school boards — who are elected by, and accountable to, the voters of each county — must start pushing back against this ridiculous, ongoing assault.
The policies up for adoption at Wednesday’s meeting could be a good place to start — assuming they pass, which they likely will. “They’re just continuing the fear mongering from session,” says Jon Harris Maurer, public policy director for Equality Florida, describing 2023 legislative changes that fall squarely into the more-of-the-same-homophobic-nonsense category.
Among the rules set for discussion:
1. An expansion of the rules intended to force students to use bathrooms associated with their gender determination at birth. This is an offshoot of 2023’s ridiculous “potty purity” law (HB 1521) that attempts to keep transgender individuals out of bathrooms that correspond with their identity across multiple venues, including private businesses and government buildings. Lawmakers have consistently ignored the fact that by determining gender through at-birth assignment, the law is all but guaranteed to generate more uneasiness because it forces individuals to use restroom facilities that don’t match with their current appearance or names. Yet lawmakers seem intent on forcing these uncomfortable confrontations, and have combined the bathroom provision with another rule that threatens the licensure status of teachers who violate it. Yet in most polls taken over the past 10 years, fewer than 40% of voters think that bathroom use by transgender people should be so illogically dictated.
2. A provision that would extend the infamous “Don’t Say Gay” provisions to middle schools. Remember when DeSantis’ then-communications director put extensive effort into convincing Floridians that the prohibition on classroom discussion of gender and sexual protection was to protect very young children from too much sexy talk — which she used as cover for the ugly contention that anyone who lined up against that legislation was a “groomer?” Well, this rips that argument to shreds: Middle-school-aged children are certainly aware that same-sex relationships exist. Yet this rule also threatens teachers with misconduct charges for talking too much about that reality.
3. A new rule that seems to be aimed at “protecting” students from unexpected exposure to drag queens at any school-sponsored event or activity, because that’s something that apparently happens all the time. (Or not.) The rule is written so broadly and confusingly that it could apply to many situations that most people would describe as harmless, including performances of Shakespeare plays, showing of the Disney film “Mulan” or a review of some religious texts.
4. Finally, a rule that punishes teachers that talk too much about preferred pronouns, which could make life difficult for English teachers.
We say these measures are likely to pass, because the Board of Education is currently acting as the public-school arm of DeSantis’ political committee. Still, we laud the organization of human-rights groups including Equality Florida, who intend to mobilize for Wednesday’s meeting (scheduled to start at 9 a.m. Wednesday at the Rosen Shingle Creek resort on Universal Boulevard in Orlando).
Their continued vocal opposition provides an ongoing reminder that, no matter how many times DeSantis and his supporters attack, this will never be something that passes without comment — and that it runs counter to the sentiments of the vast majority of the American people, who have long ago adopted a live-and-let-live approach to gender identity and sexual orientation. In an August 2022 Quinnipiac University poll, fewer than one in four Americans still opposed same-sex marriage. Support for civil-rights protections for LGBTQ people are almost as strong.
We hope, however, that local school officials are also paying attention. Unlike DeSantis’ supporters, who largely hold themselves aloof from the sentiments of Florida voters, they have to face their supporters. Even in the most conservative counties, many school board members are starting to express anguish over the pain they’re being forced to inflict. A widespread rebellion against these cruel and illogical policies might bring retaliation, since DeSantis has become increasingly fond of removing anyone from public office who dares to disagree with him.
But it would be a noble sacrifice. Florida needs more public officials to find the courage to stand up to Florida’s self-designated emperor and say “Governor, for someone so focused on ‘Don’t Say Gay,’ you sure seem to bring it up a lot. Find someone else to execute your politicized cruelty. We’re done.”
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