Execute the mentally disabled? What is Florida Supreme Court thinking? | Editorial
The Florida Supreme Court shredded precedent recently in a case called Harry Franklin Phillips vs. State. Anyone who loves someone with intellectual disabilities must pay attention.
The privileged men and women who make 21st-century Florida law have a disturbing attachment to the medieval notion that people with low two-digit IQs are expendable. In that spirit, in a 4-1 decision, the court supported those mean-spirited legislators and made it easier to execute individuals with serious cognitive and behavioral impairments.
The case ignores clear and data-driven direction from the U.S. Supreme Court forbidding the death penalty for people who, by reason of intellectual disability, are not fully culpable for their actions and who, therefore, should not be subjected to society’s ultimate punishment.
Series of reversals
The Phillips decision has an impact far beyond the killer who gives the case its name; it can land on anybody’s developmentally disabled son, daughter or sibling.
Florida’s Supreme Court has attracted national attention among nonpartisan legal scholars for its increasing brazenness in applying pretzel logic to precedent.
In January, the court reversed itself in ruling that unanimous jury verdicts were not needed to impose the death sentence.
The opinion in Phillips is per curiam, meaning no one among the deciders wanted credit for writing it. They include Charles Canady, who, prior to his appointment by Gov. Charlie Crist, was best known for his service as U.S. House manager in the impeachment of Bill Clinton.
Also in the majority was another Crist appointee, the reliably right-of-center Ricky Polston, as well as Alan Lawson, appointed by Gov. Rick Scott, and Carlos Muniz, appointed by Gov. DeSantis.
A ‘mean’ ruling
The dissenting opinion was written by Jorge Labarga, who, like Canady, was appointed to the court by Crist back when he was the Republican governor of Florida and, in his perpetual quest for higher office, pandering to Federalist Society Republicans as well as apolitical lawyers.
Labarga spent years quietly practicing law and serving without drama as a trial court judge in Palm Beach County. He was nobody’s idea of a liberal at a time when precedent was not a political plaything.
These days, Labarga is the lone holdout against he calls the “unraveling of sound legal holdings in this most consequential area of the law.” Whether two new additions to the court will share his discontent in future rulings remains to be seen. DeSantis this week appointed Palm Beach Circuit Judge Renatha Francis and attorney John Couriel to the state Supreme Court. They, too, are tight with the Federalist Society, a conservative-libertarian group that plays an outsize role in who gets a judicial nomination, all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
“I am personally shocked at the Court’s audacity and, frankly, its meanness,” attorney Stephen Harper of Florida International University’s Florida Center for Capital Representation, told the Herald of the Phillips decision. “So many people who were already granted relief by the Florida Supreme Court are now being deprived of that relief by the Florida Supreme Court.”
Harper added that precedent “has been abandoned.”
Case-by-case, the Crist-Scott-DeSantis appointees are dismantling the hard-won reputation of a court that rose from the ashes of scandals exposed in the 1970s by St. Petersburg Times reporter Martin Dyckman, winning respect nationally as a principled and scholarly institution. Politics should not upset that delicate balance.
This story was originally published May 28, 2020 at 6:00 AM.