Clemency Gone Missing From Florida’s Death Row

Sun Sentinel Editorial Board November 11, 2017

Justice is supposed to be blind, but not as blind as the U.S. Supreme Court when it ruled in 1993 that a Texas death row prisoner — who claimed to be innocent, but had run out of appeals — should look to the governor to save his life.


“Executive clemency,” wrote Chief Justice William Rehnquist, is “the 'fail safe' in our criminal justice system."
But when it comes to the death penalty in Florida, the fail-safe has gone missing.


There hasn’t been a death row commutation in Florida since 1983, the first year of Gov. Bob Graham’s second term.
Since Florida resumed executions in 1979, governors have put 95 people to death and spared only six, all by Graham.


In at least 17 of those cases, advocates say grounds existed for commuting the sentence to life in prison. That’s not “getting away” with anything, by the way. The only alternative to execution is life without parole.


In four of those cases, Florida juries had recommended life sentences, but were overruled by the judges. At least two of those put to death were insane, including one who believed he was being executed because he was Jesus. And two were Vietnam veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder.


It’s hard to understand what’s happening because when it comes to open government, death row clemency is a black hole. Everything about the process is secret unless the governor or Cabinet chooses to hold a public hearing, which hasn’t happened since the Jeb Bush administration.

There’s no way to know whether the governor is receiving erroneous reports from his staff or from the Commission on Offender Review, which reviews clemency applications.
Neither is there a way to tell whether the governor even reads the files for himself.


Like his predecessors, Gov. Rick Scott routinely signs death warrants without saying why he denied clemency, other than that he found no reason. We asked his spokeswoman. She said: “His foremost concerns are consideration for the families of the victims and the finality of judgment.”


Those final words say more than she may have realized. “Finality” is the mantra of appellate courts that have decided they’ve heard enough from a prisoner. Now it’s the governor’s mantra, too?
But what if the criminal justice system got it wrong?


It’s not a hypothetical question. Florida leads the nation in death row exonerations, with 27. That means that in sentencing someone to death, the state has gotten it wrong 27 times.


Given that sobering statistic, you have to wonder how many innocent people may have been executed or remain on death row.
Gov. Scott has presided over 26 executions, more than any governor since they were resumed in 1979. The latest took place Wednesday, when Patrick Hannon was killed by chemical injection for his role in killing two Tampa men in 1991.


The governor’s silence about his use of the ultimate punishment is an insult to the people of Florida. Nothing in government is as grave as the power to choose between life and death. He should be accountable for how he uses it. Does he read the letters sent him by families, attorneys or prisoners? Has he ever questioned the reports and requested more information? Has he ever had doubts?
It’s not “soft on crime” for a governor to commute a death row sentence to life without parole. In many ways, life without hope is a fate worse than death.


Former governors understood this.
From 1925 through 1964, the start of an unofficial nationwide moratorium, Florida governors commuted 55 of the 250 death sentences that came to their desks, a rate of 22 percent. Every governor spared at least one in five. Two commuted nearly half.
The most famous instance was LeRoy Collins’s 1956 decision to spare Walter Lee Irvin, a black man condemned for the alleged rape of a white woman in Lake County. In the aftermath, a posse killed a man who had been with Irvin that day. Irvin, along with two others, was badly beaten. Later, while being transported to jail, he was shot by a sheriff, but survived.
The Irvin commutation was used against Collins in his re-election campaign. He won.


“My conscience told me that this was a bad case, badly handled, badly tried, and now on this bad performance I was asked to take a man’s life. My conscience would not let me do it,” he said.
Collins was vindicated. The “Groveland Four” had been framed. This year, the Florida Legislature formally apologized for the injustice and asked Scott to pardon them posthumously. He has yet to say whether he will.


The Collins example deserves to be followed, not ignored.
Among the proposals filed by members of the Florida Constitution Revision Commission is one that would repeal the death penalty. This deserves serious consideration.


At a minimum, the commission should open the curtains on how governors use or don’t use the power of clemency. Given how often Florida sends the wrong person to death row, we need, as Rehnquist said, a fail-safe backstop.

                                        

* Read also: Does Clemency Exist in Florida? 

* Read the letter from Mike's familie, asking Governor Scott for an exceptional clemeny hearing. 

* Read the Petition for Clemency for Mike, written by Roseanne Eckert, Clemency Counsel

* Excellent article by Martin Dyckman -   

*Mike's website: Southern Injustice 

Why We Slaughter Turkeys, and Other People Too

Most of us blissfully assume that animals don't have a soul and so there's no real debate on whether animals, such as the over 240 million turkeys that were put to
death this past month just to satisfy our appetite for that quintessential American holiday ritual known as the Thanksgiving feast, all went to Heaven or hell - I doubt anyone gave it too much thought at all as it was just a turkey, so who really cares?

But what if it was the family dog? Or how about our beloved cat? Many would then argue that there must be a special place in the afterlife for our furry friends that were so much part of our life that we considered them to be part of our family. Many will pay incredible amounts of money to even have their beloved pet cremated or buried and will argue without reservation that their Fiddo or Fluffy certainly did have a soul. It's all about our own emotional connection to that particular animal, and that's the sort of connection we just don't make with an anonymous turkey conveniently purchased at the local supermarket, already plucked and gutted and ready to throw into the oven and cooked until the moist flesh is ready to melt in our mouths.

Amidst all this holiday pageantry there's that other now traditional ritual each Thanksgiving in which both state governors and the President of the United States publically pardons a turkey, sparing it the fate of the butcher and rather than be condemned to be devoured at Thanksgiving, this one lucky bird will instead be sent to live the rest of its life on a farm. I watch this ritual every year and always wondered how it was that they picked that one particular bird from the hundreds of millions of others that faced all but certain deaths.

Did a farmer go out to the barn and just snatch up the first turkey he got his hands on and ship it to the president and that was it? What stroke of faith spared this one otherwise undistinguishable bird from the millions of others and made it somehow worthy of this act of grace? Perhaps there was more to the story....maybe unknown to us there was a top secret commission tucked away in the basement of the White House, serving at the discretion of President Obama, and it was their solemn task to search across the vast North American continent from coast to coast for verifiable stories of remarkable acts of extraordinary valor by otherwise unknown turkeys such as that unheard story about the young child that fell into the farm pond and would have surely died if not for that one turkey that raised all sorts of ruckus until the farmer realized that something was horribly wrong and followed the turkey back to that pond, arriving just in time to save his only son. Certainly that turkey would deserve a pardon.

Or perhaps, unbeknownst to all but that top secret commission deep down in the bowels of the White House, all turkeys are inherently evil and it is our moral obligation to slaughter them and feast off their flesh just as other cultures did with their enemies, such as the Mayas who conquered their neighboring tribes and then sacrificed their prisoners to their gods, eating their flesh just as we do the turkeys. Maybe these millions of turkeys were planning to overthrow the human race and this plot would have succeeded, if not for that one heroic turkey that risked life and limb to rat out the rest of the flock. By turning snitch, he earned immunity and this whole presidential pardon ritual is nothing more than yet another governmental conspiracy to perpetuate an image for the masses of sheep (i.e., average Americans) to blindly believe, allowing them to feel morally justified when they gather around that table and feed off that turkey flesh. 

Maybe Tom the turkey is actually part of the Taliban and this American thanksgiving ritual is an extension of this never-ending "war on terror" coordinated behind the scenes by Homeland Security. No, that can't be - this turkey slaughter began long before our beloved CIA created what we now call the Taliban. Oh - I know, it's got to be a communist plot, as we all know turkeys do live in what could be described as quasi-Siberian gulags and this certainly wouldn't be the first time that a former prisoner organized his other brethren to rise above their shackles and chains and overthrow society.

Now that i think about it, I do recall watching a program about poultry farms and how these seemingly innocent turkeys would gather in little groups they call "flocks" and can be heard clucking and gobbling amongst themselves in a language unknown to us. If that isn't proof enough that they must be plotting  against us, then think about this for a moment...why are all these turkeys white?
Myself, I'm a white guy and I must admit that I've been white my whole life. And so I know what happens when you get that many white guys in a group as it's our inherent nature to inevitably plot to take over the world and if we can do it then why not these hundreds of millions of nothing but white turkeys, raised on farms throughout the land by white rednecks?

Which brings us to the "people" equation in all of this. Now, I guess when it comes down to it I can't really swear under oath that I actually seen what I thought I saw when that big white turkey stood on that table as our even bigger black president proudly granted it a pardon, as his daughters looked on, but I want to say that I'm pretty sure that as the camera momentarily focused on the turkey I might have seen it ruffle its feathers and sort of wink, as if looking straight into my soul and sending me that message, telepathically laughing at me as unlike that turkey, we all knew I have no chance at being granted a pardon. And even that turkey knew that if it was a person, it wouldn't have any hope for a pardon, either.

The truth of the matter is just this simple - millions of turkeys must die to feed our appetite each Thanksgiving and this whole ritual we go through to get there is necessary as it just wouldn't be the same without the ritual ....and we got to kill a few people too as that's the American way.

No, these hundreds of millions of turkeys were not plotting to take over the world and those few turkeys that were granted pardons didn't perform any heroic acts to deserve that act of grace. But I'd like to think that these turkeys, and all living creatures, do have a soul as if they do perhaps there's still hope for humanity too.

As these turkeys were led away to their mass slaughter and this machinery of death brought about their demise, delivering their frozen flesh to the local supermarket so that the average American family could feast from their flesh, then discard their picked bones into the trash  without so much as another thought, I'd like to think that the soul of each of those turkeys rose above the horror inflicted upon their bodies and they now look down upon us without malice or the need for vengeance, but rather they bow their beaks in a silent moment of unified prayer that one day humanity will evolve beyond its need to kill. And maybe if enough turkeys pray for humanity, maybe one day we too will evolve into a species that is no longer driven by that need to kill and this ritual of death we so desire will be a page of past history.

But I doubt I'll be around to see it, as like all those turkeys, my days are now numbered and the state of Florida is already in the process of carrying out its own ritual of death. With what might be my last appeals exhausted, I'm now going through the "clemency" process, knowing only too well that at least here in Florida nobody has been granted clemency in over 30 years. Once they go through the pretense of clemency review, then my death warrant will be signed and my execution scheduled, and I proceed forward knowing that nobody has survived a death warrant in Florida in many year.

And most likely before the next turkey is again granted a pardon, I will be led into Florida's own slaughter house and laid out before those that gather to watch this ritual, metaphorically gathered to feed off my flesh. While convincing themselves that my death is morally justified, and some will even celebrate the successful execution, others will be hurt deeply by my passing. But in the end, society will not pass any longer at that moment of my death as they did at any other state-sanctioned killing. It is a necessary ritual and at the end of the day for the same reason we slaughter hundreds of millions of turkeys to feed off their flesh and appease our appetite, so too do we kill people by only too similar rituals and yet no matter how many might die, our appetite is never satisfied.

Michael Lambrix  #482053
Union Correctional Institution
7819 NW 228th street
Raiford, Florida 32026

Please sign Michael's Petition HERE
https://www.change.org/p/governor-rick-scott-please-spare-michael-lambrix-s-life