Against the wishes of anti-death penalty advocacy groups, Governor Rick Scott has signed into law the Timely Justice Act, a complex piece of legislation regarding death penalty procedures in the state. It's most prominent feature is aimed at speeding up the process for prisoners on death row to meet their maker.
Critics, such as Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, warn that with the highest number of death row prisoners exonerated (at 24) in the country, Florida is the last state that should be speeding up the pace of executions, which the legislation would do by limiting appeals and mandating prompt death warrants.
“No one knows how many more innocent people are awaiting execution on Florida’s Death Row. A new law that speeds up executions by limiting appeals will almost certainly lead to the execution of innocent men and women,” said Mark Elliott, Director of Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty. “It is unconscionable to hurry up executions and further restrict access to evidence of innocence.”
As CL reported in a recent cover story (entitled "Faster, Governor, Kill!, Kill!"), Florida has become an outlier of sorts regarding the death penalty legislation in recent years. While six states in the past six years have ended the practice, the state has some laws in the books (such as having a jury vote by a simple majority to recommend a death sentence) that go further to the right than anywhere in the country.
According to bill sponsor Matt Gaetz (R-Fort Walton Beach), the legislation will speed up the time after a death row conviction nearly in half, from the current average of over 13 years to approximately seven years.
However, the legislation also contains provisions that critics of how the state currently handles death row cases have applauded, such as establishing a North Florida office of the Capital Collateral Regional Counsel (CCRC), which is responsible for legal representation in post-conviction proceedings for those sentenced to death. (There currently are CCRC offices for Middle and South Florida.) The bill would also revise the experience requirements for attorneys working for the CCRC, and direct the courts to furnish to the Florida Bar findings that an attorney provided deficient representation.
But it is the provision speeding up death row cases that has dominated the reporting on this story, and the most recently exonerated death row prisoner, Seth Penalver, has been prominent in decrying the legislation. Penalver was released after 18 years in prison and on Death Row just before Christmas last year after he was re-tried in Broward County in the death of three people back in 1994.
“If executions are sped up, then we will be killing innocent people like me.” said Penalver in a press release this afternoon. “Evidence of my innocence was withheld and hidden for almost eighteen years after my conviction. Executing innocent people is murder by all, not justice for all."
(Update: Governor Scott's office has released a press release that "Sets the record straight").
MYTH: HB 7083 “speeds up” and “fast tracks” executions.The bill does nothing to speed up the execution process. The bill makes technical amendments to current law and provides clarity and transparency to legal proceedings.
MYTH: The bill shortens the duration of the appeals process.
The bill does not address the time frame of appeals, but rather affirms appellate, and post conviction remedies, before the clemency process begins. Bottom line, before a death warrant is signed, the legislation mandates that an inmate must still go through a long and thorough review process.
It preserves and affirms the inmate’s existing rights to 1) a direct appeal, 2) a state post-conviction hearing; 3) a post-conviction appeal; 4) a federal habeas-corpus proceeding, and; 5) a federal habeas corpus appeal.
MYTH: The bill would have resulted in the execution of inmates that would have been exonerated.
Not a single one of the 24 “exonerated” inmates identified by the Death Penalty Information Center would have been certified as eligible for a death warrant under the requirements of HB 7083, because none of them had exhausted their legal remedies.
MYTH: The bill will lead to more executions and takes away protections from inmates.Nothing in this bill alters the current protections afforded by the courts or the clemency process and adds protections to inmates by removing ineffective counsel.