FlaglerLive | October 14, 2016
The court’s 5-2 decision, which will immediately affect 40 inmates and many of the 385 others on death row, ends Florida’s status as an outlier state where non-unanimous death penalty recommendations were allowed.
FlaglerLive | July 12, 2016
Giving more “deference” to the Florida Department of Corrections, a sharply divided appeals court Tuesday approved revamping the legal process for inmates who challenge disciplinary decisions that take them out of the general prison population.
FlaglerLive | May 9, 2016
While the decision is not necessarily controlling in Flagler County and the rest of Florida, it again muddies the fate of a law barely eight weeks old, and further sheds a harsh light on Florida’s outlier system of executions.
FlaglerLive | April 25, 2016
Anthony Julian Collins was two months shy of 17 when he was committed an attempted second-degree murder, carjacking with a firearm and attempted armed robbery.
FlaglerLive | April 19, 2016
Debt from fines starts at sentencing and can grow at interest rates of 12 percent or more while inmates serve their sentences. It continues to grow after they’re released and face the numerous barriers to finding work and housing.
FlaglerLive | February 24, 2016
Rick Scott shouldn’t plan on signing any more death warrants soon, if ever, argues Martin Dyckman, even as the Florida House “cured” what the U.S. Supreme Court specifically found wrong with Florida’s death penalty.
FlaglerLive | February 2, 2016
The U.S. Supreme Court invalidated Florida’s death-penalty sentencing scheme on Jan. 12, forcing the state to rewrite its law but also putting in question whether the new law must apply to all 489 death row inmates.
FlaglerLive | January 28, 2016
Florida is the only state in the nation where a simple jury majority is enough for a death penalty recommendation, one of several problems at odds with a new U.S. Supreme Court ruling on Florida’s capital punishment system.
FlaglerLive | January 12, 2016
The United States Supreme Court, in an emphatic ruling Tuesday, declared Florida’s death penalty sentencing scheme to be a violation of the Sixth Amendment.
FlaglerLive | June 29, 2015
In the 5-4 majority opinion issued Monday, Justice Alito wrote that the first of the three-drug lethal cocktail used also used in Florida, “entails a substantial risk of severe pain.”
FlaglerLive | March 19, 2015
The justices ordered lower Florida courts to apply a 2014 law to inmates who, as juveniles, were sentenced in the past either to life in prison or to terms that would have effectively kept them behind bars until they die. Two of the inmates were convicted of murder.
FlaglerLive | February 5, 2015
States changed from hanging to electric chair because it was a modern, supposedly painless method of execution. Botched executions have rendered that assumption problematic.
FlaglerLive | November 8, 2014
Two inmates serving life in prison for murders committed as juveniles are challenging their sentences based on a 2012 US Supreme Court ruling that bans mandatory life sentences for juveniles.
FlaglerLive | September 19, 2014
ISIS beheadings have provoked instinctive revulsion, justly so. Too bad the same reaction doesn’t follow Florida’s and other American state’s equally barbaric continuation of the death penalty, a habit other civilized nations have abandoned.
FlaglerLive | June 19, 2014
No other first-term governor has signed the execution warrants of so many inmates since Florida re-instituted the death penalty in 1976. Since then, the state has executed 87 inmates. One in five of those has been executed on Scott’s watch, in less than four years.
FlaglerLive | May 27, 2014
The court, in a 5-4 decision, said Florida’s use of an IQ score of 70 “creates an unacceptable risk that persons with intellectual disability will be executed, and thus is unconstitutional.” “Intellectual disability is a condition, not a number,” wrote Justice Kennedy for the majority.
FlaglerLive | May 8, 2014
A new report issued by the Constitution Project on Wednesday recommends that states like Florida scrap the three-drug lethal injection cocktail that resulted in a botched execution in Oklahoma last week and switch to a single drug instead. But Gov. Rick Scott’s administration says it’s making no changes.
FlaglerLive | March 6, 2014
Florida sentences more juveniles to life in prison without parole than any other state, but the pressure is on the Legislature this year to comply with restrictive U.S. Supreme Court rulings because without sentencing guidelines, the Florida judiciary is filling the gap one case at a time.
FlaglerLive | February 27, 2014
Howell was convicted in 1994 in the 1992 murder of Florida Highway Patrol trooper Jimmy Fulford in 1992 when a bomb Howell manufactured exploded in the trooper’s hands after a traffic stop.
FlaglerLive | February 4, 2014
More than 150 lawyers and Death Row inmates are challenging the so-called Timely Justice Act, signed by Gov. Rick Scott in June, intended to speed up executions. Lawyers argue it violates the constitutionally protected separation of powers as well as inmates’ rights to due process.
FlaglerLive | January 28, 2014
The decision to seek the death penalty simply can’t be justified either by society’s or individuals’ desire for revenge, argues Steve Robinson. Were that the case, we could issue baseball bats to family members and let them beat the convict to death in the town square.
FlaglerLive | November 19, 2013
A 5-2 Florida Supreme Court vote put the execution of convicted murderer Askari Abdullah Muhammad on hold Monday to consider claims that the three-drug cocktail used to put inmates to death could cause unnecessary suffering.
FlaglerLive | August 12, 2013
Attorney general Eric Holder on Monday delivered a seminal speech outlining a plan to revamp federal drug policy and incarceration rates of non-violent and elderly offenders, and urging Congress to review mandatory sentencing in light of a “war on drugs” that has not worked. The full speech.
FlaglerLive | June 27, 2013
The suit alleges that the law, which goes in effect July 1, would violate the separation of powers by imposing obligations on lawyers that conflict with judicially-determined rules, and that it would alter the court’s authority to govern capital post-conviction litigation and would violate due process and equal protection.
FlaglerLive | June 15, 2013
In signing the so-called “Timely Justice Act,” Scott went against the tide of calls, letters and emails urging him to veto it. As of Thursday, his office had received 447 phone calls, with 438 opposed to the bill; 14 letters, with 13 opposed; and 14,571 emails, with 14,565 opposed.
FlaglerLive | June 13, 2013
William van Poyck had spent nearly 26 years on death row after his conviction in 1987 in the murder of a prison guard. He spent many of those years writing books and maintaining a public blog, which chronicled in the last weeks his last days on death row. Excerpts are included.
FlaglerLive | May 14, 2013
Gov. Rick Scott is not waiting to sign a bill that would accelerate the pace of capital-punishment executions in Florida. The death warrants he’s signed since April lead to the fastest-paced series of executions since four inmates were killed in March 1998, when Lawton Chiles was governor.
FlaglerLive | April 30, 2013
Florida lawmakers gave final approval to fast-tracking executions and reducing Death Row stays, with supporters saying they want justice for victims’ families — but critics warning about executing innocent people, 24 of whom have been exonerated in Florida since 1976.
FlaglerLive | March 23, 2013
In turns moving, startling and informative, a day-long workshop on the death penalty in Flagler Beach, featuring two exonerated men, urged an assembly of 60 to more actively get involved in a movement to abolish capital punishment in Florida.
FlaglerLive | March 19, 2013
The workshop between 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. Saturday, March 23, at Santa Maria Del Mar’s Community Hall, will feature former death row inmates Herman Lindsey (exonerated in 2006) and Seth Penalver (2012), along with several other death penalty experts and advocates for the repeal of Florida’s capital punishment.
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