Recent editorials from Mississippi newspapers:
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Feb. 5
The Miami Herald on independent voters casting ballots in partisan primaries:
It’s that time of year when Democrats and Republicans in Florida are pushing hard to add unregistered Floridians to the voter rolls with a D or an R next to their names. With their presidential primary just over a month away, state Democrats are especially motivated.
The push is fast and furious now. The deadline to register for Florida’s March 17 Presidential Preference Primary is Feb. 18. We can’t emphasize enough how important every vote will be in November.
But Florida voters who are neither D nor R - independents - have always gotten the short end of the stick, shut out of primaries with no early say in choosing the ultimate presidential candidates.
Florida’s closed-primary system largely excludes the state’s growing population of independents, and it’s not fair.
Fortunately, a well-organized petition process to give independents a voice from the outset could be on the cusp of making it to the ballot to let voters decide.
It’s not always a case of red or blue for voters in Florida. Disenchantment with partisan infighting, political gridlock and leaders’ simplistic party pandering have has pushed many Americans - including Floridians - to register independent, or NPA, No Party Affiliation.
According to the League of Women Voters of Florida, the number of residents registering as NPA increased by 55% between 2014-2016.
Which means that those Floridians have voluntarily excluded themselves from voting in party primaries.
In Florida, the number of registered independents is at more then 3.6 million, about 27% of the electorate - who are unable to cast ballots in primary elections for Congress, the Legislature and president in 2020 because they have registered as no party affiliated.
Florida is one of 13 states that still holds closed primaries. With the major parties in control of the primaries, no-party voters are left to shape only early outcomes in nonpartisan races lower on the ballot, from school boards to judicial offices.
It’s past time to remove the muzzle from independent voters. That’s why we support the efforts of All Voters Vote, which has gathered enough signatures to place a citizen initiative on the November ballot. It would allow all registered Floridians to vote in a single primary for governor, cabinet members and state legislators.
The initiative could significantly alter state politics in Florida.
All Voters Vote is the brainchild of Miami healthcare mogul Mike Fernandez, who has thrown millions into this worthy effort to simply make more votes count in the state. Kudos to Fernandez, a former Republican, for identifying and focusing laser-like on a practical solution. The campaign has gathered the number of verified signatures to get on the ballot.
However, its efforts are not favored by Florida’s Democratic and Republican parties.
Their attorneys recently argued to the Florida Supreme Court that the amendment misleads voters by not telling them that the primary-election process will be fundamentally changed. If so, pre-election information and awareness campaigns can overcome that.
It’s time for Florida to unleash the 3.6 million independent voters who do not get a say in the primaries.
After all, they are among the most coveted voters in the general election when both Democrats and Republicans are salivating for their votes.
Online: https://www.miamiherald.com/
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Feb. 5
The Palm Beach Post on the relationship between Gov. Ron DeSantis and Agriculture Commissioner Nicole “Nikki” Fried:
The lone Democrat holding statewide office in Florida, Nicole “Nikki” Fried, seems to be getting under Republicans’ skin.
For one thing, Gov. Ron DeSantis is working to strip Fried’s Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services of one of its functions: the Office of Energy.
Fried - if you’ll pardon the expression - has re-energized the office since becoming agriculture commissioner a year ago, making a priority of energy efficiency and renewable energy. In this short time, her office among other things produced a lengthy plan on energy and hosted a statewide summit on energy and climate change, the first in a decade.
Now comes what Fried calls a “partisan power grab.” She’s right. It’s curious that a Republican governor is suddenly intent on taking over an oft-orphaned office that was bounced around to three different agencies before landing in the Agriculture Department in 2011.
Could it perhaps, possibly, conceivably have something to do with Fried being the first Democrat in a dozen years to be elected to a cabinet-level position - and to try to make the most of it?
DeSantis is following a well-worn script. When Democrats recently clawed back to win the governorships of Wisconsin and North Carolina, Republicans promptly took steps to strip those offices of their powers to render the new office-holder impotent. Luckily, courts or voters blunted much of these efforts.
But what has really gotten Florida Republicans’ goat is that Fried has plastered her smiling face on inspection stickers on thousands of gas pumps around the state. She says that displaying her image offers consumers an added touch of accountability. Sure. But it’s also excellent marketing for a politician who might have her sights set on re-election or a bid for higher office in 2022.
A spokesman for House Speaker Jose Oliva, R-Miami Lakes, thunders that the Fried-beaming stickers are “unseemly, self-promoting and contrary to taxpayer interests” - which would be a reasonable criticism if it didn’t come from political rivals who might simply be jealous that they didn’t think of the ploy first.
The Republican-dominated Legislature decreed last year that the stickers had to go; Fried’s office says they took the directive to mean a prohibition on new stickers. But now, House Republicans are saying that Fried ignored them - and that if she doesn’t come up with a plan to replace the stickers, they will withhold $19.7 million in programs for the Agriculture Department.
Talk about petty politics.
Fried’s office spent $5,000 for 120,000 inspection stickers. For that $5,000 so “contrary to taxpayer interests,” Republicans now threaten to hold back almost $20 million. That would hurt not Nikki Fried but thousands of Floridians who rely on consumer protections.
Franco Ripple, a Fried spokesman, says the gas-pump stickers are already being replaced. Yet the “outrageous” House proposal “jeopardizes active criminal investigations, 61,000 lab analyses, almost 9,000 fair ride inspections and the handling of nearly 400,000 consumer inquiries and complaints.” He added that “the jobs of 284 hardworking state employees could be at risk - perhaps indefinitely.”
It is outrageous that lawmakers would play hardball in this manner: threatening to halt important services for everyday Floridians just to put an upstart political rival in her place.
Given this context, it’s not hard to ascribe political motives for DeSantis’ effort to grab the Office of Energy for himself. The method of acquisition is through the Legislature: Under a bill approved last week by a House subcommittee, the Office of Energy would leave the Agriculture Department for a new home in the Department of Environmental Protection.
Meanwhile, DeSantis is seeking to place the DEP under his direct control. Same with the Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles. Currently, those departments report to independently elected members of the Florida Cabinet (which, besides the governor, include the attorney general, chief financial officer … and Agriculture Commissioner Fried).
The 76-page Florida Energy and Climate Plan produced by Fried’s Office of Energy urges that Florida start to shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy, and in the near term focus on energy conservation. It’s a far more plainspoken and aggressive approach to fighting climate change than we’ve seen from any state leader in quite a while. If DeSantis does take control of this office, it will be his responsibility to build upon this approach - not smother it, as so many in his party have done.
Fried might not be doing everything right, but she has shown that she isn’t afraid to stir up a certain amount of trouble - good trouble. She deserves the public’s support as she battles those trying to stop her for purely political reasons.
Online: https://www.palmbeachpost.com/
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Jan. 30
The SunSentinel on the death penalty:
There is no room for confidence that Florida hasn’t executed innocent people or won’t do so again.
Former Supreme Court Justice Gerald Kogan, who had sought the death penalty as a prosecutor and opposed it in private practice, spoke in stark terms to an Amnesty International conference.
“We certainly have, in the past, executed those people who either didn’t fit the criteria for execution in the State of Florida or who, in fact, were, factually, not guilty,” he said.
That was 20 years ago.
At least 73 times in recent years, Florida’s error-prone criminal justice system has convicted people who were later exonerated, including 29 who had been sent to death row.
More than 327,000 people went to Florida’s state prisons during the past 10 years, so the exoneration rate is miniscule. If it proves anything, it is only the extraordinary difficulty of persuading the courts to admit and correct their human errors. Instead, the judiciary is primed to bury its mistakes.
Post-conviction barriers to fixing mistakes is one of the strongest reasons for abolishing the death penalty, as we and others have advocated.
No example is more damning than the ordeal of James Dailey, 76, who shouldn’t even have been convicted 33 years ago, let alone be on the brink of execution, for a murder that another man has repeatedly said he committed alone.
Dailey’s case exposes five of the system’s faults: Questionable evidence, over-zealous prosecutions, unequal treatment of co-defendants, the reliance on rules and technicalities to the exclusion of fairness, and the failure of six recent governors to commute even one sentence to life in prison without parole.
As the Florida Supreme Court has declared on more than one occasion, innocence is not grounds to overturn a verdict, even with a life at stake. The defendant must show that the trial court or the state did something wrong, and that his attorneys didn’t wait until too late to call attention to it. As in Dailey’s case, there is a fatal phrase: “Procedurally barred.”
No physical or eyewitness testimony linked Dailey to the 1985 murder of a 14-year-old girl in Pinellas County. After a co-defendant was sentenced to life in prison rather than death, the sheriff’s office scoured the jail for inmates who might say that they heard Dailey say he did it. To jog their memories - or their imaginations - the lead detective brought newspaper accounts of the murder.
He turned up three snitches. The most harmful was a career criminal named Paul Skalnick, who was notorious for selling out fellow prisoners to get sweet deals for himself. He once boasted in a letter to Gov. Lawton Chiles that “I have placed 34 individuals in prison, including four on death row.”
Skalnick was a serial con artist and, later, a bigamist who admitted to Dailey’s jury that he had been charged with “grand theft,” but “not murder, not rape, not physical violence in my life.” In fact, according to ABC News and Dailey’s attorneys, prosecutor Robert Heyman knew that his office had dismissed a child sex assault case against Skalnick in exchange for testimony against other inmates. Rather than expose the deception, Heyman argued to the jury that as a thief, Skalnick was a better sort of criminal - and a more credible witness.
Five days after Dailey was sentenced to death, Skalnick was released without bond on a grand theft charge despite a parole officer’s earlier warning that he would “always be a danger to society.” He skipped out and continued his crime spree in Texas, where he was eventually convicted of child rape.
Strong indications of perjury and prosecutorial misconduct are crucial issues in last-ditch appeals pending in Circuit Court at Clearwater and with the U.S. Supreme Court.
Having relied on the worst sort of hearsay testimony to uphold Dailey’s death sentence, the Florida courts dismissed as hearsay the compelling evidence that Jack Pearcy, Dailey’s co-defendant, committed the murder alone.
Pearcy admitted his guilt to other prisoners and signed two affidavits absolving Dailey. But when brought before a circuit judge, he balked at testifying. Pearcy, 64 and a prisoner for 33 years, was concerned about jeopardizing his chances for parole.
At the prosecution’s request, according to Dailey’s attorneys, the judge warned Pearcy that it could be against his best interest to repeat his confession in open court.
In an application to speak on Dailey’s behalf at the U.S. Supreme Court, seven present and former prosecutors accuse the state of misleading the jury in 1987 to believe the jailhouse snitches “were testifying solely out of altruistic motives” and had more to lose than gain by helping the state convict Dailey.
The seven include former attorneys general of Virginia and Tennessee, and a former state attorney at Jacksonville, Harry Shorestein.
“The jury never learned,” they wrote, “that all three informants had greatly profited from their testimony. All three had their sentences significantly reduced because they agreed to testify against Mr. Dailey….The prosecutor assured jurors that there was no reason to disbelieve the informants.
“The risk that the three informants fabricated testimony is very real … the risk is so substantial that to proceed with an execution on this state of the record is untenable.”
If Dailey were given a new trial, he would almost certainly go free - as he should.
Skalnick, who damned Dailey with highly suspect testimony, is no longer available to do it again. He was in a nursing home in Texas when a reporter found him for a New York Times Magazine lead story entitled “False Witness.” Even if he could travel, his subsequent criminal record would disqualify him as a state witness.
Florida leads the nation in death row exonerations. Dailey’s would make 30. It is long overdue.
Online: https://www.sun-sentinel.com/
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