Editorial Roundup: Florida

Recent editorials from Florida newspapers:

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April 21

The Palm Beach Post on protesters wanting beaches and businesses to reopen:

Social distancing is hard.

It is wearing to sit in the house day after day, frustrating to be deprived of such simple pleasures as a walk in the park or a dinner out or even the ability to distinguish one day from another.

It is nerve-wracking to go shopping, armored in face masks and caution, afraid of contact with your fellow shoppers, with the cashier. It is scary to be a worker in that store, not knowing if this is the day when the novel coronavirus gets to you.

It is devastating to be furloughed or laid off, to see your business shuttered.

Even for those of us who stay healthy, the halt to normal life is a wrecker of plans and futures.

And yet, we are doing it. Despite the great costs, we are doing it. And willingly. As of last week, 81% of Americans told the Politico/Morning Consult poll that “Americans should “continue to social distance for as long as is needed to curb the spread of coronavirus, even if it means continued damage to the economy.”

This is a remarkable display of concern for our neighbors, as well as for our own health. We are making sacrifices not just for ourselves, but for the greater good.

Yet some are cracking. They’re dressing up in the colors of the American flag, waving banners bearing “Trump” and - confusing a public-health emergency with a tyrannical infringement of liberty - demanding that public officials “reopen” the economy as if the shutdown had nothing to do with slowing down the death toll of COVID-19.

Organized by right-wing groups, publicized approvingly on right-wing news outlets and by the president himself, we saw them first in East Lansing, Mich. Then a smattering of other state capitals. And then in a caravan of about 100 vehicles that gathered on Sunday from Hollywood, Coral Springs, Boca Raton and Boynton Beach, converging on Delray Beach’s Atlantic Avenue.

Leading a contingent from Boca to Delray was Boca Raton’s vice mayor, Jeremy Rodgers, who said he was acting as a private citizen. Yet the Boca Raton City Council, of which he is a member, is scheduled this evening to discuss a resolution that would ask Palm Beach County to reopen “beaches, passive public and private parks and tennis courts, and private golf courses to the public … as soon as prudently possible.”

The public pressure upon the Palm Beach County Commission is matched by the pressure from golfers who are pushing hard for permission to return to the fairways - although any one of them may be carrying the virus unknowingly. Unfortunately, they seem to have found a receptive ear in Commissioner Robert Weinroth, who has signaled a disappointing willingness to bend the rules for an influential elite.

Palm Beach County Health Director Dr. Alina Alonso has set a good measure for when it will be safe to end social distancing: when the number of county residents diagnosed with COVID-19 drops for 14 consecutive days. We have, mercifully, slowed the daily count of confirmed COVID-19 cases; despite a fearsome 125 deaths in this county as of Tuesday morning. But no one can say when we will see the first day of decline in new cases, let alone the start of a two-week string.

Nevertheless, Gov. Ron DeSantis, who was so slow to declare a statewide stay-at-home order, is now itching to get this over with as soon as he can. On Monday he announced a Re-Open Florida Task Force and said he wants recommendations by Friday. His appointees, troublingly, include one hospital administrator but no doctors, epidemiologists or scientists. He mainly plucked corporate leaders, GOP donors and fellow Republicans in the Florida Cabinet - glaringly leaving out the cabinet’s lone Democrat, Nikki Fried, who as secretary of agriculture happens to oversee Florida’s second largest industry and regulates key functions of our food supply.

DeSantis’ conspicuous show of partisan politics, as well as his demotion of scientific data and medical knowledge, mark a poor way to proceed. We need our elected leaders to lead all of us, not just the businesses that supply so much of their campaign cash or the noisy few who are honking their horns and attracting the cameras.

An overwhelming majority of Americans understand the stakes in this pandemic. Floridians are no exception. They are doing their best to keep themselves and others safe at great cost emotionally and financially.

Our elected leaders should be proud of this sacrifice. Moreover, they should be encouraging them rather than kowtowing to a selfish group of privileged few who place more value on hitting a little ball around or crowding onto a beach than the health of their neighbors.

Online: https://www.palmbeachpost.com/

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April 19

The Miami Herald on Gov. Ron DeSantis releasing the names of eldercare facilities where coronavirus cases have been confirmed:

“It’s personal now.”

This is from Jorge Zamanillo, a grieving Miami resident whose elderly mother died of the coronavirus this month at an eldercare facility.

No doubt, it’s been personal for thousands of families in Florida who have been kept in the dark about the health and well-being of elderly moms and dads, aunts and uncles and grandparents in nursing homes and assisted-living facilities - hotspots for the coronavirus.

But on Saturday, these families scored a long-overdue victory. Gov. DeSantis ordered state health officials to release the names of eldercare facilities where cases of the coronavirus have been confirmed among staff and residents. Unfortunately, that’s all the public received. No total number of cases, nor the number of deaths.

DRAGGED HIS FEET

Unfortunately, this is simply more of his incremental, baby-step approach to Florida’s whole coronavirus crisis. He’s dragged his feet on everything from closing the beaches - some of which he foolishly reopened on Friday - to his eventual stay-at-home order. This narrow release of facilities’ names is just more of the same. He can, and must, do better by the people he was elected to serve.

DeSantis said that when he ordered health officials to release the names, that they were to “do it as soon as possible. It’s not something we want to wait around on.”

Of course, it’s hypocritical for DeSantis to try to suddenly sound pro-active. He did “wait around.”

For weeks, he refused to identify the facilities. He was so adamant that, when the Miami Herald filed suit against the state to get it to name the nursing homes and ALFs, the DeSantis administration cowed the Herald’s now-former legal counsel, Holland & Knight, into dropping the case. The Herald’s case was taken up by another firm, Thomas and LoCicero, and was joined by a coalition of other newspapers and media outlets.

CHANGED HIS MIND

Why did DeSantis flip-flop?

Perhaps it was the disclosure that one in five deaths from COVID-19 in Florida has occurred in an eldercare facility. Perhaps he’s agreed to grant the eldercare industry the immunity it’s seeking from lawsuits. It would be a mistake to take away this power from aggrieved families. Perhaps it took an in-your-face story.

What became so tragically personal for Jorge Zamanillo, is that his mother Rosa, 90, died of the coronavirus at the eldercare facility, where she had lived for eight years. As reported by Herald Tallahassee bureau chief Mary Ellen Klas, “In four days, Rosa Zamanillo went from singing Cuban ballads and eating well at the Residential Plaza assisted-living facility in Miami, to being unrecognizable by her youngest son.”

Jorge Zamanillo didn’t have a clue that his mother had become deathly ill until the day before she passed away. Yes, she had tested positive for COVID-19, caused by the coronavirus, but she wasn’t showing any symptoms.

That was April 8. On April 10, a hospice doctor called the son and told him that his mother didn’t have long to live. Rosa Zamanillo died a day later.

The only reason we know all of this is because Jorge Zamanillo courageously contacted the Herald with his story. No other family in Florida should have to suffer in confused silence. We still urge readers across the state to tell their stories to the Herald at tips@MiamiHerald.com.

And one more thing: When Sunshine Week, which highlights government efforts to withhold vital information, rolls around next year, pay attention. You never never know when it’s going to be personal.

Online: https://www.miamiherald.com/

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April 17

The Sun Sentinel on wrongful convictions:

Mark these words:

“If the identification was bad, then everything that comes after is bad as well.”

A Florida prosecutor wrote those words.

Etch them on the wall of every police station and sheriff’s office. Have law schools drill them into every future prosecutor, defense attorney and judge.

Let every citizen remember them when serving on a jury.

Fewer innocent people would be sent to prison.

It happens all the time. Eyewitnesses who get it wrong are one of the primary causes of wrongful convictions. According to the Innocence Project, out of 367 people whom DNA had set free, 252 owed their convictions to mistaken identifications. That’s 69 percent.

Misidentifications were the primary reason for convictions in 24 of Florida’s 71 exonerations since record-keeping began.

Leonard Cure, 50, is likely to become the 25th.

A judge set him free last week, 16 years into a life sentence for robbery, on the recommendation of the same prosecutor’s office that had convicted him.

His is the first case processed by the Conviction Review Unit that Broward County State Attorney Mike Satz wisely established last year to hear from people whose pleas of innocence had struck out in the courts.

Although the review is not complete, the assistant state attorney assigned to the case, Ariel Demby Berger, believed the conviction was so dubious that Cure should be resentenced to time served while the investigation continues. Satz and Circuit Judge John J. Murphy agreed.

Cure was accused of robbing a Dania Walgreen’s at gunpoint after a sheriff’s deputy looked at pictures of people with criminal records and said she recognized him as a man she had seen walking outside a nearby school that day. The victims, an employee and the store manager, agreed that Cure was the robber, but there were problems with how the photos were shown to them. One was that Cure’s photos were presented to the manager twice in a way that standard police procedures now forbid.

Cure had a good alibi from his work at a distant construction site and an ATM receipt from a few minutes before the robbery. There were enough problems with the case that the first jury to hear it couldn’t agree on a verdict. The state then offered Cure a seven-year sentence in exchange for a guilty plea. He turned it down. A second jury convicted him and Circuit Judge Fred Berman sentenced him to life in prison because of previous arrests.

“The issues we find most troublesome are those surrounding how Cure became a suspect in the first place,” Demby Berger wrote. “Seemingly, a man who had no connection to a Walgreen’s robbery became the main suspect after someone reviewed photos of well-dressed/neat appearing African American males. That was it, there was no physical evidence, no witnesses who knew him …The case became questionable at the very onset. If the identification was bad, then everything that comes after is bad as well.”

Of the 24 Florida exonerees convicted because witnesses misidentified them, 13 were black. That’s 54 percent, a rate higher even than the proportion of blacks, 49 percent, in the prison system overall.

Many studies have documented the phenomenon known as “own-race bias.” Witnesses are more often accurate - although still far from perfect - in identifying members of their own race. Despite the evidence, studies show, most people, including prosecutors, believe that witness identifications are probably correct.

Same-race identifications can do great harm also. Clifford Williams Jr. and his nephew Hubert Myers of Jacksonville hold the Florida record for wrongful incarceration, more than 43 years. They’re black. So was the witness who said she saw them shoot her and murder her roommate. Deputies and prosecutors let confirmation bias blind them to strong evidence that the men were innocent. They were set free after an investigation by the Fourth Circuit State Attorney’s conviction integrity unit.

“Research shows that the human mind is not like a tape recorder; we neither record events exactly as we see them, nor recall them like a tape that has been rewound,” Broward Public Defender Howard Finkelstein wrote in 2007 in an appeal for better police identification procedures.

Most of what he recommended is now standard policy. But mistakes, of identification and otherwise, will continue to haunt the criminal justice system, which is devoted to applying rules rather than to the fundamental question of innocence vs. guilt.

Florida’s Supreme Court refuses to consider actual innocence as grounds for overturning a sentence. It requires compelling new evidence.

There was none in Cure’s case. Without Satz’s Conviction Review unit, he would have remained in prison for life.

Broward’s is only the fourth such unit among Florida’s 20 circuits, joining those at Jacksonville, Tampa and Orlando. Every circuit should have one but legislation to that effect didn’t get a committee hearing in Tallahassee this year.

Because some state attorneys don’t care for conviction review, there should also be a state innocence commission like North Carolina’s.

Injustice does not necessarily end with exoneration and a release from prison. In the Jacksonville case, state law provided for $2.1 million in compensation to Myers, but not to Williams because he had a previous conviction. Last month, the House and Senate voted unanimously to pay Williams as well, but more than four weeks later, the presiding officers have yet to sign the bill and send it to the governor.

In a Seminole County case, Clemente Aguirre-Jarquin spent 10 years on death row for a double murder before the Florida Supreme Court, citing new evidence of innocence, granted him a new trial. He remained behind bars for more than two more years before the prosecution abruptly dropped the charges with jury selection already underway. When he applied for compensation, a judge ruled that he hadn’t done so soon enough; even though he was still locked up when a two-year deadline passed. Legislation to compensate him was introduced in the Senate this year, but didn’t get even a hearing.

Online: https://www.orlandosentinel.com/