As Judge Peter Kubota ordered the shackled removed from Ian Schweitzer, who served 23 years for a murder and sexual assault DNA evidence showed he likely didn’t commit, perhaps the foremost reason this was possible is because Schweitzer wasn’t put to death. Sure, the Innocence Project, DNA, the cooling of mindless passion and lessons learned about jailhouse snitches, all helped. But if he was dead, then so what?
Despite involving, as seems obvious in retrospect, every failed trope of bad evidence and prejudice, he was doomed from the start because it was a high profile murder and someone needed to pay. That “someone” was Schweitzer and two others, and everybody was certain of his guilt, so certain that the evidence didn’t matter. He was guilty. Everybody knew it. Except maybe he wasn’t.
At about the same time, on the other side of a country, a governor complained to sheriffs that it was just too hard to kill a man.
Calling it “one of the things we have to address,” DeSantis said that a “supermajority” of jurors ought to be sufficient to sentence someone to death.
“If just one juror vetoes it, then you end up not getting the sentence,” DeSantis said during remarks delivered at the Florida Sheriffs Association Conference. “Maybe eight out of 12 have to agree, or something, but we can’t be in a situation where one person can just derail this.”
While much of the country sought to end the blight of capital punishment, whether because of its cruelty or its foundational legal system being too fraught to rely upon to take a person’s life, Florida’s governor went the other way. Here, he vented about the verdict not to execute Nikolas Cruz.
DeSantis was expressing his frustration with the decision of a jury in November to sentence Nikolas Cruz, who killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018, to life in prison rather than handing down the death penalty. Despite the governor’s description of the jury, FloridaPolitics.com notes that there were three jurors, not just one, who refused to impose the death penalty.
The crime was horrific, and there was no doubt of the identity of the shooter. Cruz would get the death penalty one way or the other, sooner or later. That was the only choice given and the jury had to be unanimous to impose sooner. This lacked the visceral satisfaction that many including DeSantis, would have preferred, whether it was pulling the lever, the trigger, the switch or the plunger, someone would be put to death. DeSantis was dissatisfied that it wouldn’t happen that way and blamed the requirement of a unanimous jury.
Crazy as it may seem that a less than unanimous jury would be imaginable, it was, in fact, the norm in Florida, just as Louisiana and Washington State allowed non-unanimous verdicts, shocking (to me) when I learned of this. And then there’s Alabama, but I digress.
Prior to 2016, Florida allowed juries to impose the death penalty with as little as a 7-to-5 majority. That changed after the state Supreme Court ruled in 2016 that “the jury’s recommended sentence of death must be unanimous” in order to comport with the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishments. In a separate case decided at the same time, the state’s high court invalidated a newly passed law that would have allowed the death penalty if 10 of the 12 jurors recommended it.
A year later, the state legislature and then–Gov. Rick Scott, a Republican, approved a new law requiring unanimous juries in death penalty decisions.
So in 2017, Florida entered the 20th Century as to capital verdicts by enacting a law requiring that a death penalty jury be unanimous. Bear in mind, jurors in death cases are “pre-qualified” so as to screen out any juror who would not impose death. Problem solved?
While DeSantis’ remarks on Monday were somewhat vague, it would appear the governor is preparing to revisit the territory staked out by that overturned 2016 law that would have allowed supermajority juries to recommend the death penalty.
He may face a more welcoming legal environment now, as the Florida Supreme Court in 2020 overturned its own ruling in that 2016 death penalty case. So while the state law requiring unanimous juries in death penalty decisions remains in force, the state’s high court has signaled that convicts can once again be sentenced to death by non-unanimous juries.
While many might consider this a parochial Florida problem, DeSantis’ higher profile as the new and improved flavor of Darth Cheeto, combined with his proclamation that Florida is the state where woke bought a condo at Century City, this valorization of capital punishment is neither about being woke or some rough desire for justice, but the realization that the legal system isn’t, and will never be, reliable enough to justify putting a defendant to death.
Sure, there may be no doubt that Cruz perpetrated the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School massacre, and few will shed a tear for whatever befalls him, but the same would have been said about Ian Schweitzer at the time of his conviction.
Perhaps DeSantis has a more rational argument for changing Florida’s death penalty laws to make it easier for the state to kill convicted criminals, but the case he outlined on Monday seems more based on vengeance than on justice.
When one tries to frame the argument around some concept of “justice,” there can be no answer as we each have our own idea of what justice means and how it happens in any given instance. If there is any meaning to the word, then it would be that no one should be put to death without absolute certainty that he committed the crime and deserves that punishment.
Our legal system isn’t up to the task of such certainty, even if Cruz is the exception. At the absolute least, if the prosecution can’t manage to convince a death-qualified jury unanimously, then the death penalty should not be imposed. At best, it should never be imposed, and let Nikolas Cruz get the slow death penalty for what he did.
No comments:
Post a Comment