Post by CCADP on Aug 26, 2005 7:37:39 GMT -5
Sides disagree about long appeals process
By NATHAN CRABBE
Sun staff writer
August 26. 2005 6:01AM
Font Size: 101112131415161718192021222324
APPEALS:
State's Death Row population third largest
Alachua County's Death Row Inmates
STEPHEN BOOKER,
51; burglary, rape and murder of an elderly Gainesville woman; has spent 26 years on Death Row.
RONALD HEATH,
44; robbery and murder of Atlanta businessman visiting Gainesville; 14 years on Death Row.
DANNY ROLLING,
51; murder of five Gainesville college students; 11 years on Death Row.
SOURCE: Florida Department of Corrections
Notable Florida executions since 1976
TED BUNDY,
42; killed two women in Tallahassee sorority and 12-year-old girl in Lake City, may have committed as many as 100 murders in other states; executed after nine years on Death Row.
MICHAEL DUROCHER,
33; murder of his girlfriend and her two children in Clay County; executed after two years on Death Row. He was the first inmate to drop appeals and served the shortest time between sentence and execution.
AILEEN WUORNOS;
46, murder of seven men she claimed raped her while she was working as a prostitute; executed after 11 years on Death Row after she dropped her appeals.
AMOS KING,
48; rape and murder of a Tarpon Springs woman; maintained innocence until execution after 26 years on Death Row.
PAUL HILL,
49; killed a Pensacola abortion doctor and driver; executed after nine years on Death Row after he dropped his appeals.
SOURCE: Florida Department of Corrections
oments after Danny Rolling was sentenced to death in 1994, the brother of one of his five victims exploded in anger in the courtroom.
"Five years," Mario Taboada yelled at the man who killed his brother, Manny. "You're going down in five!"
Now, more than 11 years later, Taboada said he's frustrated by an appeals process that could last for years more before Rolling is executed.
"Anything that gets dragged out works in his favor," Taboada said.
To some, the length of time Rolling and other inmates spend on Death Row shows the need to speed up the appeals process. The average length of time between sentencing and execution in Florida is nearly 12 years, and the number would be much higher if not for a slew of recent "volunteers" for execution who abandoned further appeals they could have filed.
To others, the cases of former Starke resident Joseph Nahume Green and other inmates exonerated from Death Row show the danger in rushing appeals. At least 21 Death Row inmates have been freed from Florida's Death Row since 1976, the most for any state in the country. Another inmate died of cancer on Death Row before he was exonerated.
Green was sentenced to death for killing a Starke woman in 1992, but was cleared of the crime nearly eight years later. The only witness in the case initially said the murderer was a white man before changing his story to identify Green, who is black. After the witness was revealed to be intoxicated at the time of the murder, and so mentally impaired he thought the White House was in Jacksonville, Green was acquitted. "Justice worked in that case, but it took a hell of a long time," said Miami attorney George Nachwalter, who represented Green in his civil lawsuit for compensation.
The state now has 367 people awaiting execution, the third-largest Death Row population behind California and Texas. Sixty inmates have been on Florida's Death Row two decades or longer, the same number as have been executed since the death penalty was reinstituted in 1976.
Nine different avenues
Death Row inmates have at least nine possible stops for post-trial appeals in the state and federal courts before execution. Rolling has been through seven. It could take another year or two before his last two appeals wind through the system, said Carolyn Snurkowski, an assistant deputy attorney general who handles the state's case against him.
"You never know what's going to creep up," she said.
In Rolling's case, appeals have centered around the question of whether his attorneys were ineffective in failing to win him a change of venue. Rolling pleaded guilty and was sentenced to death in Gainesville, the site of the murders and immense pre-trial publicity.
The courts have repeatedly rejected that argument, finding that his attorneys made a strategic decision to stay in the city because of its liberal reputation. In July, the U.S. District Court denied his latest appeal on that basis.
He's since filed a petition declaring his intent to appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in Atlanta. If that court also denies his appeal, the U.S. Supreme Court would be his final recourse before execution.
Taboada said he worries about new issues arising the longer Rolling's appeals last. From 1973 to 2003, Florida's Death Row inmates were seven times more likely to have their sentences overturned or commuted than be executed, according to U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics.
State Sen. Rod Smith, D-Alachua, was prosecutor in both the Rolling and Green cases. He said he doesn't like what has happened with either case since the original trials.
He still questions whether Green is actually innocent, but views his case as an example of the system working properly. "Certainly we err on the side of being correct," he said.
But proponents and opponents of the death penalty say overturned cases show the system is broken. Too much time and resources are used for a system in which so many cases are overturned, said Abe Bonowitz, director of the Gainesville-based Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty. "It makes me wonder how any . . . fiscally responsible politicians could keep a system with such a failure rate," he said.
But Sharon Tewksbury, spokeswoman for Parents of Murdered Children, said the figure shows judges delay and overturn sentences because of their personal opposition to the death penalty. "When personal issues and agendas get involved, every delay that's possible is made," she said.
Record stays
Even if Rolling's appeals take several more years to resolve, he would still fall far short of the longest current stay for a Death Row inmate. That distinction falls to Gary E. Alvord, who has delayed his execution 31 years over questions of his competency. Alvord killed three Tampa women in 1973 after he escaped from a Michigan mental hospital.
Another inmate, William Elledge, has appealed his death sentence for 28 years despite confessing to strangling a Hollywood woman in 1974. His latest appeal argued that the very fact he hasn't been killed yet is cruel and unusual punishment.
After that appeal was rejected last month, he received a letter from a member of the group Crazy Pros. The group sends letters to Death Row inmates across the country asking that they volunteer for execution.
"You have an opportunity to shape your own destiny and be thought of as a man, instead of a coward," the letter read. "By choosing to drop your appeals you get to choose your own legacy and help to bring closure to the people that you have hurt in the past."
Six of the the last nine executions in Florida have been inmates who dropped their appeals. The so-called "volunteers" include serial killer Aileen Wuornos, subject of the movie "Monster," and Paul Hill, who murdered an abortion doctor and the man's driver.
But many more inmates use their full number of available appeals. And Florida's record number of Death Row exonerations shows the need for such a process, said Susan Cary, a Gainesville attorney who handles death penalty cases.
Many wrongful convictions involve false eyewitness identifications, witnesses who lied to receive a lesser punishment for their own crimes and other issues that are difficult to sort out, she said. "Sometimes it takes years and years before the truth is really known," she said.
In Green's case, it took nearly eight years.
In December 1992, Judy Miscally, the society page editor of the weekly Bradford County Telegraph, was shot and killed at a pay phone in Starke. Green was arrested, convicted and sentenced to death largely on the statements of the state's only eyewitness, Lonnie Thompson.
Finding Thompson's testimony "inconsistent and contradictory," the state Supreme Court overturned the conviction in 1996 and ordered a new trial. After the trial judge found Thompson was mentally retarded, intoxicated at the time of the murder and couldn't remember basic details of the event, he acquitted Green in 2000.
Green subsequently sued authorities for compensation, which was resolved in a sealed settlement. Nachwalter, who represented Green in that case, said he believes he couldn't have received a fair trial the first time around.
"They wanted their pound of flesh. They wanted a lynching," he said.
State lawmakers and the courts have long wrangled over how to make executions both fair and fast. A botched execution in which foot-long flames shot from an inmate's head in 1997 caused a delay in executions, until the state Supreme Court upheld the electric chair as a form of punishment two years later.
Lawmakers passed a measure in 2000 allowing lethal injection as an alternative form of execution. The bill also aimed to reduce the time of death sentence appeals to five years, but the state Supreme Court struck down that part of the law.
Connie Ankney, a Punta Gorda woman who lobbied for the law, said she was frustrated the court made her efforts moot. Ankney, whose son and daughter-in-law were murdered in 1997, said the scales of justice are tilted toward inmates at the expense of victims. "Now that they're in prison, they have so many rights and we have had our rights taken away," she said.
Both victims and advocates for Death Row inmates should support appeals that expose wrongful convictions, said Jenny Greenberg, director of the Florida Innocence Initiative In Tallahassee. Keeping innocent people behind bars means guilty parties remain free, she said.
She points to the case of Death Row inmate Frank Lee Smith, who spent 14 years appealing his conviction for raping and murdering an 8-year-old girl in South Florida. He died in prison of cancer 11 months before DNA evidence revealed another man committed the crime.
Police said they believe that man, Eddie Lee Mosley, a convicted rapist and murderer who was living in the Tacachale center for mentally retarded defendants in Gainesville, raped dozens more women while Smith was behind bars.
"Many more victims were made and that was completely unnecessary," she said.
The cases led lawmakers to pass a measure in 2001 allowing some inmates to get DNA testing of physical evidence. But the law had a two-year limit and called for evidence to be destroyed at the end of that period. The deadline was later extended and is now set to expire Oct. 1. Gov. Jeb Bush ordered earlier this month that evidence be preserved past that time, but the other elements of the law will expire if no action is taken.
Smith was one of the original proponents of the deadline. He said the deadline was meant to ensure innocence cases get DNA quickly tested, but now that it hasn't happened, he supports lifting it.
"We have to allow testing no matter how long it takes," he said.
But Smith, now a candidate for governor, said he thinks cases in which innocence isn't a question should be treated differently.
Dianna Hoyt, whose stepdaughter, Christa, was killed by Rolling, said she believes cases like Rolling's - where there is both a confession and DNA showing he did it - should be expedited.
"There's a difference and I think there needs to be a different way that they're handled," she said.
Taboada said he will keep pushing for Rolling's speedy execution. But he rejected the idea the execution will provide some sort of closure for his family.
"In reality, there is no closure," he said. "This is something that lasts and sticks with you forever."
Nathan Crabbe can be reached at (352) 338-3176 or crabben@gvillesun.com.
The Gainsville Sun
By NATHAN CRABBE
Sun staff writer
August 26. 2005 6:01AM
Font Size: 101112131415161718192021222324
APPEALS:
State's Death Row population third largest
Alachua County's Death Row Inmates
STEPHEN BOOKER,
51; burglary, rape and murder of an elderly Gainesville woman; has spent 26 years on Death Row.
RONALD HEATH,
44; robbery and murder of Atlanta businessman visiting Gainesville; 14 years on Death Row.
DANNY ROLLING,
51; murder of five Gainesville college students; 11 years on Death Row.
SOURCE: Florida Department of Corrections
Notable Florida executions since 1976
TED BUNDY,
42; killed two women in Tallahassee sorority and 12-year-old girl in Lake City, may have committed as many as 100 murders in other states; executed after nine years on Death Row.
MICHAEL DUROCHER,
33; murder of his girlfriend and her two children in Clay County; executed after two years on Death Row. He was the first inmate to drop appeals and served the shortest time between sentence and execution.
AILEEN WUORNOS;
46, murder of seven men she claimed raped her while she was working as a prostitute; executed after 11 years on Death Row after she dropped her appeals.
AMOS KING,
48; rape and murder of a Tarpon Springs woman; maintained innocence until execution after 26 years on Death Row.
PAUL HILL,
49; killed a Pensacola abortion doctor and driver; executed after nine years on Death Row after he dropped his appeals.
SOURCE: Florida Department of Corrections
oments after Danny Rolling was sentenced to death in 1994, the brother of one of his five victims exploded in anger in the courtroom.
"Five years," Mario Taboada yelled at the man who killed his brother, Manny. "You're going down in five!"
Now, more than 11 years later, Taboada said he's frustrated by an appeals process that could last for years more before Rolling is executed.
"Anything that gets dragged out works in his favor," Taboada said.
To some, the length of time Rolling and other inmates spend on Death Row shows the need to speed up the appeals process. The average length of time between sentencing and execution in Florida is nearly 12 years, and the number would be much higher if not for a slew of recent "volunteers" for execution who abandoned further appeals they could have filed.
To others, the cases of former Starke resident Joseph Nahume Green and other inmates exonerated from Death Row show the danger in rushing appeals. At least 21 Death Row inmates have been freed from Florida's Death Row since 1976, the most for any state in the country. Another inmate died of cancer on Death Row before he was exonerated.
Green was sentenced to death for killing a Starke woman in 1992, but was cleared of the crime nearly eight years later. The only witness in the case initially said the murderer was a white man before changing his story to identify Green, who is black. After the witness was revealed to be intoxicated at the time of the murder, and so mentally impaired he thought the White House was in Jacksonville, Green was acquitted. "Justice worked in that case, but it took a hell of a long time," said Miami attorney George Nachwalter, who represented Green in his civil lawsuit for compensation.
The state now has 367 people awaiting execution, the third-largest Death Row population behind California and Texas. Sixty inmates have been on Florida's Death Row two decades or longer, the same number as have been executed since the death penalty was reinstituted in 1976.
Nine different avenues
Death Row inmates have at least nine possible stops for post-trial appeals in the state and federal courts before execution. Rolling has been through seven. It could take another year or two before his last two appeals wind through the system, said Carolyn Snurkowski, an assistant deputy attorney general who handles the state's case against him.
"You never know what's going to creep up," she said.
In Rolling's case, appeals have centered around the question of whether his attorneys were ineffective in failing to win him a change of venue. Rolling pleaded guilty and was sentenced to death in Gainesville, the site of the murders and immense pre-trial publicity.
The courts have repeatedly rejected that argument, finding that his attorneys made a strategic decision to stay in the city because of its liberal reputation. In July, the U.S. District Court denied his latest appeal on that basis.
He's since filed a petition declaring his intent to appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in Atlanta. If that court also denies his appeal, the U.S. Supreme Court would be his final recourse before execution.
Taboada said he worries about new issues arising the longer Rolling's appeals last. From 1973 to 2003, Florida's Death Row inmates were seven times more likely to have their sentences overturned or commuted than be executed, according to U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics.
State Sen. Rod Smith, D-Alachua, was prosecutor in both the Rolling and Green cases. He said he doesn't like what has happened with either case since the original trials.
He still questions whether Green is actually innocent, but views his case as an example of the system working properly. "Certainly we err on the side of being correct," he said.
But proponents and opponents of the death penalty say overturned cases show the system is broken. Too much time and resources are used for a system in which so many cases are overturned, said Abe Bonowitz, director of the Gainesville-based Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty. "It makes me wonder how any . . . fiscally responsible politicians could keep a system with such a failure rate," he said.
But Sharon Tewksbury, spokeswoman for Parents of Murdered Children, said the figure shows judges delay and overturn sentences because of their personal opposition to the death penalty. "When personal issues and agendas get involved, every delay that's possible is made," she said.
Record stays
Even if Rolling's appeals take several more years to resolve, he would still fall far short of the longest current stay for a Death Row inmate. That distinction falls to Gary E. Alvord, who has delayed his execution 31 years over questions of his competency. Alvord killed three Tampa women in 1973 after he escaped from a Michigan mental hospital.
Another inmate, William Elledge, has appealed his death sentence for 28 years despite confessing to strangling a Hollywood woman in 1974. His latest appeal argued that the very fact he hasn't been killed yet is cruel and unusual punishment.
After that appeal was rejected last month, he received a letter from a member of the group Crazy Pros. The group sends letters to Death Row inmates across the country asking that they volunteer for execution.
"You have an opportunity to shape your own destiny and be thought of as a man, instead of a coward," the letter read. "By choosing to drop your appeals you get to choose your own legacy and help to bring closure to the people that you have hurt in the past."
Six of the the last nine executions in Florida have been inmates who dropped their appeals. The so-called "volunteers" include serial killer Aileen Wuornos, subject of the movie "Monster," and Paul Hill, who murdered an abortion doctor and the man's driver.
But many more inmates use their full number of available appeals. And Florida's record number of Death Row exonerations shows the need for such a process, said Susan Cary, a Gainesville attorney who handles death penalty cases.
Many wrongful convictions involve false eyewitness identifications, witnesses who lied to receive a lesser punishment for their own crimes and other issues that are difficult to sort out, she said. "Sometimes it takes years and years before the truth is really known," she said.
In Green's case, it took nearly eight years.
In December 1992, Judy Miscally, the society page editor of the weekly Bradford County Telegraph, was shot and killed at a pay phone in Starke. Green was arrested, convicted and sentenced to death largely on the statements of the state's only eyewitness, Lonnie Thompson.
Finding Thompson's testimony "inconsistent and contradictory," the state Supreme Court overturned the conviction in 1996 and ordered a new trial. After the trial judge found Thompson was mentally retarded, intoxicated at the time of the murder and couldn't remember basic details of the event, he acquitted Green in 2000.
Green subsequently sued authorities for compensation, which was resolved in a sealed settlement. Nachwalter, who represented Green in that case, said he believes he couldn't have received a fair trial the first time around.
"They wanted their pound of flesh. They wanted a lynching," he said.
State lawmakers and the courts have long wrangled over how to make executions both fair and fast. A botched execution in which foot-long flames shot from an inmate's head in 1997 caused a delay in executions, until the state Supreme Court upheld the electric chair as a form of punishment two years later.
Lawmakers passed a measure in 2000 allowing lethal injection as an alternative form of execution. The bill also aimed to reduce the time of death sentence appeals to five years, but the state Supreme Court struck down that part of the law.
Connie Ankney, a Punta Gorda woman who lobbied for the law, said she was frustrated the court made her efforts moot. Ankney, whose son and daughter-in-law were murdered in 1997, said the scales of justice are tilted toward inmates at the expense of victims. "Now that they're in prison, they have so many rights and we have had our rights taken away," she said.
Both victims and advocates for Death Row inmates should support appeals that expose wrongful convictions, said Jenny Greenberg, director of the Florida Innocence Initiative In Tallahassee. Keeping innocent people behind bars means guilty parties remain free, she said.
She points to the case of Death Row inmate Frank Lee Smith, who spent 14 years appealing his conviction for raping and murdering an 8-year-old girl in South Florida. He died in prison of cancer 11 months before DNA evidence revealed another man committed the crime.
Police said they believe that man, Eddie Lee Mosley, a convicted rapist and murderer who was living in the Tacachale center for mentally retarded defendants in Gainesville, raped dozens more women while Smith was behind bars.
"Many more victims were made and that was completely unnecessary," she said.
The cases led lawmakers to pass a measure in 2001 allowing some inmates to get DNA testing of physical evidence. But the law had a two-year limit and called for evidence to be destroyed at the end of that period. The deadline was later extended and is now set to expire Oct. 1. Gov. Jeb Bush ordered earlier this month that evidence be preserved past that time, but the other elements of the law will expire if no action is taken.
Smith was one of the original proponents of the deadline. He said the deadline was meant to ensure innocence cases get DNA quickly tested, but now that it hasn't happened, he supports lifting it.
"We have to allow testing no matter how long it takes," he said.
But Smith, now a candidate for governor, said he thinks cases in which innocence isn't a question should be treated differently.
Dianna Hoyt, whose stepdaughter, Christa, was killed by Rolling, said she believes cases like Rolling's - where there is both a confession and DNA showing he did it - should be expedited.
"There's a difference and I think there needs to be a different way that they're handled," she said.
Taboada said he will keep pushing for Rolling's speedy execution. But he rejected the idea the execution will provide some sort of closure for his family.
"In reality, there is no closure," he said. "This is something that lasts and sticks with you forever."
Nathan Crabbe can be reached at (352) 338-3176 or crabben@gvillesun.com.
The Gainsville Sun