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Monday, March 5, 2001

Death-penalty bill offers no benefit, much harm

News-Journal Editorial

Civilized societies do not sentence children to death. They do not execute the mentally retarded.

Florida´s lawmakers don´t seem to grasp that. They´re pushing a constitutional amendment that, if approved by voters, would strip Floridians of basic rights and allow horrendous miscarriages of justice.

There´s no need for this legislation. Florida's death penalty is grimly secure – despite the gradual shift in public opinion away from executions. Recent action in both courts and the Legislature rendered even speculative threats moot.

The situation was slightly different in 1998, when lawmakers asked voters to approve an amendment preserving the death penalty. At the time, the gruesome outcomes of badly botched electrocutions were fresh in everyone´s memory, as was the Florida Supreme Court´s admonition that the state was headed for a constitutional train wreck if its death-penalty law wasn´t revised.

That spawned a 1998 constitutional amendment, which was really aimed at preserving the electric chair, not the death penalty. The amendment didn´t prevent the eventual switch to lethal injection – but it did remove the state prohibition against cruel or unusual punishment for any crime.

That one word – or – has provided Floridians with an extra layer of protection against bizarre, arbitrary or downright crazy ideas hatched by lawmakers eager to look tough on crime. But the ballot language never let Floridians know they were being asked to surrender this protection.

Last year, the state´s high court properly threw the amendment out.

But the same bad language is back, worse than before and on rails apparently greased for passage. In both House and Senate, the amendment is ready for the floor – despite the fact that Florida residents can´t even view the House version of the bill. The Senate version (SJR 124) is available on the Internet, but the text of a crucial amendment is not.

Why the rush? Are leaders – like Sen. Locke Burt, who´s sponsoring the Senate bill – afraid to let constituents and colleagues get a close look at what´s happening?

If voters approve this, Florida will be the only state in the nation that specifically permits the death penalty in its Constitution. And it will be the only state that specifically permits the execution of minors.

If this amendment passes, Florida will be forced to rely on the U.S. Supreme Court's interpretion of capital punishment laws – which allow the execution of retarded criminals and inmates who were as young as 16 when they committed their crime.

Does this state really need to do anything to ease the execution of tenth-graders?

The Legislature could, of course, pass a law that sets a minimum age for criminals facing the death penalty. It could -- it probably will -- pass a law barring the execution of the profoundly mentally retarded.

But that won´t change the fact that this amendment is unnecessary, that it is being deceitfully advanced, and that it takes away protections all Floridians now share.

Allowing this amendment to progress would be a mistake, and one that should be abandoned before any real damage is done.

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