Recent editorials from Florida newspapers:
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Dec. 24
The SunSentinel on sober homes in Florida:
A Palm Beach County grand jury again has offered good ideas on how to address a state problem. Perhaps this time the Legislature will adopt them.
Previous county grand juries addressed public corruption and state supervision of children. The topic this time is sober homes. They are an acute problem in Palm Beach County and a growing problem statewide. As the report notes, Florida has become “the major medical tourism destination for substance abuse treatment and recovery housing.” The problem is not so much these tourists but those who lure and exploit them.
Sober homes began to proliferate in South Florida more than a decade ago, after the widespread use and abuse of prescription painkillers. Boca Raton lost a federal lawsuit after the city tried to restrict where sober homes could go. Mayor Susan Haynie believes that the four-year court battle, which ended in 2007, caused many operators to set up in Delray Beach. That year, a New York Times article referred to Delray as “an oasis of sobriety.”
Because the federal government considers those in recovery a protected class, cities and counties have been powerless to regulate and even identify sober homes until police and fire-rescue departments respond to calls for overdoses, crimes or neighbors’ complaints. The real estate crash made many homes affordable and available in single-family neighborhoods.
The report lays out how bad sober home operators abuse the system. They pay a treatment center as much as $500 per week per patient for referrals. Patients, who live in the sober homes while undergoing outpatient treatment, typically are young and from out of state. Desperate parents with no ability to check out providers send their children after checking websites that often are deceptive. “The evolution of technology,” the report said, “has far surpassed the few laws that exist to govern such conduct.”
The grand jury reviewed five “areas of concern” - marketing, group housing, potential actions by the Florida Department of Children and Families, patient brokering and the role of law enforcement. The report also correctly points out that the bad sober homes create many victims - residents whose neighborhoods decline, parents who get fleeced and addicts who don’t get clean.
Though Tallahassee has been too slow to respond, the report makes clear that the Legislature can act. Here’s how:
— The state should criminalize deceptive marketing and set advertising standards that match those for other services. Consumers should get disclaimers. Marketers should have to obtain licenses.
— The state should provide oversight of sober houses and any facility that deals with treatment facilities. Sober houses should need certification from the Florida Association of Recovery Residences and licensing from the DCF. Only certified treatment centers and sober homes should do business with each other.
— Though the DCF, the state should conduct more frequent, more rigorous inspections of sober homes. The state should consider a sober home license “a privilege, not a right.” The state needs more “resources” for these services, but the state could offset the cost by raising license and registration fees.
— The state should better define and toughen the law against patient brokering. “Minimum fines,” the report said, “should also be reflective of the outrageous profits made by patient brokers.” The Florida Attorney General’s Office of Statewide Prosecution should have authority to work with state attorneys on patient brokering.
— There should be a more collaborative campaign against bad sober homes. It should involve not just government but insurance companies, which bad operators overbill for services, especially urine tests.
In an interview with the Sun-Sentinel Editorial Board, Delray Beach Mayor Cary Glickstein praised the recommendations and the vehicle. A grand jury, he said, “hopefully will spur action in Tallahassee.” If the Legislature doesn’t allocate money, Glickstein at least wants Florida to “start out-of-state messaging to counter the baloney misinformation from the recovery industry: ’Don’t send your loved ones to Florida for addiction treatment or recovery. They aren’t getting better and many are dying alone on our streets.’ “
The report does cite “the Florida model,” defining it as “outpatient treatment coupled with recovery housing. The model has proven to be extremely lucrative given the ease of setting up and operating an outpatient treatment center (which can be opened in any strip mall) while warehousing patients off-site in unregulated homes.”
Glickstein said cities and counties have waited three years for Tallahassee to acknowledge and address the sober home issue. The grand jury report provides legislators all they need to help local governments. Now the report needs some powerful champions.
Online:
https://www.sun-sentinel.com/
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Dec. 24
The Orlando Sentinel on death row legal petitions:
Florida courts could be hit with a flood of legal petitions from more than 200 of 384 inmates on death row after the state Supreme Court ruled this week that the state’s capital-punishment process has been fundamentally flawed for years. Orange-Osceola Public Defender Robert Wesley told the Sentinel it could take a decade to clear a looming backlog of re-sentencings.
Critics of the state Supreme Court in the Florida Legislature will consider this week’s rulings another reason to bash the justices for activism. House Speaker Richard Corcoran has been vowing to bring the court to heel for overturning legislative actions.
But it was the U.S. Supreme Court that set the table for this week’s state court rulings when it found Florida’s death penalty unconstitutional in an opinion it issued in January. The most outspoken advocates of judicial restraint at the time on the U.S. Supreme Court, Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, joined the 8-1 majority that struck down Florida’s law.
Florida legislators looking for someone to punish could start by putting themselves in the dock. Legal experts warned legislators for years that our death-penalty law would not withstand a constitutional challenge. And most legislators ignored them.
More than 14 years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Ring v. Arizona that the death penalty in Arizona was unconstitutional because the state’s law allowed a judge, not a jury, to determine whether capital punishment was the appropriate sentence. Seven states with similar death-penalty laws soon changed them to comply with the Ring ruling.
Florida also had a similar law yet didn’t change it, despite clear admonitions like this one from the state Supreme Court’s chief justice in 2002, Harry Lee Anstead: “I must express my concerns that Florida’s scheme may not comply with the Sixth Amendment as now construed” by the U.S. Supreme Court.
After the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Florida’s death penalty in January, legislators begrudgingly rewrote the state law to empower juries in capital cases. Yet they spurned counsel from legal experts to require unanimity from jurors on sentencing. Instead, they heeded pleas from prosecutors to require only 10 of 12 jurors to vote for execution. In October, the state Supreme Court threw out that approach.
No death-row inmates in Florida will have their convictions overturned or be released as a result of this week’s state Supreme Court rulings. Instead, most of those inmates sentenced since the Ring ruling in 2002, or whose appeals were not final by that date, will be eligible for re-sentencing.
If a judge grants an inmate’s request, and a prosecutor decides to seek the death penalty again, a hearing will be held with a new jury making the call on punishment. If the jury doesn’t vote unanimously in favor of the death penalty, the inmate will be re-sentenced to life in prison.
The process is bound to be challenging, especially for older cases in which witnesses are no longer available. It will be labor-intensive; the hearings amount to mini-trials. And it could be traumatic for families and friends of both victims and defendants.
Many legislators will be infuriated at the prospect of some death-row inmates being spared; of courts, prosecutors and public defenders being bogged down for years in the re-sentencing process; and of taxpayers spending millions more to underwrite the process. We feel their pain. But this is a Capitol-created calamity.
Online:
https://www.orlandosentinel.com/
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Dec. 23
The Tampa Bay Times on fake food claims:
State agencies responsible for protecting Florida’s consumers and food supply have taken notice of the fraud served at too many restaurants and farmers markets. Claims about locally sourced ingredients are too often fiction, and that deceives diners who wind up paying too much for frozen or imported food. The state is acting responsibly by stepping up oversight and enforcement to ensure Floridians are eating what they expected, and officials should keep it up.
In her investigative series “Farm to Fable,” Tampa Bay Times restaurant critic Laura Reiley noted numerous claims from area restaurants about the origins of their ingredients and then set out to verify them. What she uncovered was blatant misrepresentation: “Florida” seafood that’s actually frozen and imported from Asia; restaurant menu boards listing specific farms they don’t buy from; “local” dishes with every ingredient coming frozen in a box. Some farmers markets, whose popularity has boomed in the last few years, also have dirty secrets. In some cases, few vendors in the stalls are actually farmers. Some of what’s sold are grocery chain rejects or wholesalers’ products with the labels peeled off. Not heirloom. Not heritage. Not small batch.
There are a number of reasons this false advertising persists. For one, it preys on consumers’ growing desire to eat food that’s fresh, healthy, sustainably farmed and from small businesses. Slap a “farm-to-table” label on something and all those virtues are implied. But consumers also need more knowledge about how and where food grows. And until now, the state has devoted too little attention to ensuring food is truthfully described.
In the latest installment of her series, Reiley reported progress on that front. Attorney General Pam Bondi’s office is investigating restaurants across the state and talking to farmers to assess the scope of food misrepresentation. The Department of Business and Professional Regulation has increased investigations into restaurant claims, issuing 12 violations over false “farm-to-table” claims in Hillsborough and Pinellas counties in the last eight months. (In the prior two years, no such violations were issued.) The same department has issued a 37-page training guide for inspectors that defines common terms, explains seasonal availability and advises them what to look for on their visits. The Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services has developed a flier to help train inspectors and educate restaurant owners on seasonality.
These efforts are fundamental consumer protections. Diners can unknowingly consume food they’re allergic to if it’s misrepresented on a menu or, more likely, pay a premium for a product that is supposedly local and fresh but is actually neither. Beyond that, by beefing up oversight the state is protecting its own brand. “Fresh from Florida” is the state-run food marketing program with a $13.6 million annual budget. Restaurants can use the logo on their menus to identify ingredients grown or produced here. But the program has essentially run on the honor system, and Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam is wise to be tightening up requirements for using the marketing line and using penalties for misuse.
What else should be done? Add restaurant inspectors. Inspectors making unannounced visits to look for food safety and sanitation violations and menu misrepresentations are the best way to keep restaurant owners honest. But Florida needs more of them. Just 191 inspectors are responsible for policing the state’s 40,000 restaurants. That’s a woefully inadequate force, and the Legislature should provide more money to hire more inspectors.
The popular farm-to-table movement is all about food that’s fresh and local, descriptions that too many food purveyors are using with little to back it up. Bondi and Putnam should continue to protect consumers by cracking down on dishonest claims that have been largely ignored for too long. More restaurants and farmers markets will improve their practices and accurately promote their offerings if it’s harder to get away with misrepresentations and they know consumers are paying attention.
Online:
https://www.tampabay.com/
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