Recent editorials from Florida newspapers:
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Sept. 24
The Daytona Beach News Journal on the case for Florida to tighten jailhouse informant rules:
Among the factors that have sent innocent people to prison for crimes they didn’t commit, one stands out for its sheer cynicism and potential for abuse. Jailhouse informants trade testimony against other inmates for more favorable treatment by prosecutors.
Nationwide, 20 percent of DNA-based exonerations feature lying informants. As a result, many states are tightening the rules on the use of jailhouse informants. Florida should follow suit.
A skillful prosecutor can make it seem as if a jailhouse informant is heroically coming forward at great personal risk. But an unscrupulous prosecutor can also work with informants to flesh out those convincing details - or even worse, collaborate to create testimony describing confessions that never took place.
Nobody wants to believe that would happen. But in at least three high-profile Florida exonerations, it probably did:
-William Dillon, freed in 2007 after spending 27 years in prison on a trumped-up murder charge. One of the key witnesses in Dillon’s 1981 conviction was Roger Dale Chapman, who described Dillon confessing to, and even acting out, the murder in a jail dining hall. Decades later, DNA evidence definitively exonerated Dillon. Chapman appeared at a 2009 legislative inquiry, describing how investigators threatened to falsely charge him as well if he didn’t help convict Dillon.
-Wilton Dedge, exonerated in 2004 - eight years after DNA proved he didn’t commit the rape that kept him in prison for 22 years. Dedge was convicted (on very shaky evidence) in 2002, and when that conviction was overturned, re-tried in 2003. In an oh-so-convenient twist, Dedge had been transported in a van with Clarence Zacke, an active Brevard County jailhouse informant who claimed Dedge provided a detailed description of the rape. That led to a second conviction for Dedge, who was innocent, and a sharp reduction in Zacke’s original three life sentences.
-Chad Heins, released from prison 14 years after he was charged with murdering his sister-in-law in Jacksonville. During his trial, two inmates testified that Heins described committing the murder and then erasing physical evidence - testimony that conveniently filled in glaring holes in the state’s case A third inmate later testified that he’d overheard the first two inmates conspiring to lie.
These cases, and others, have already inspired reforms in Florida. Standard jury instructions include a section on evaluating the credibility of witnesses who may “have a reason to make a false statement in order to strike a good bargain with the State.”
In 2014, the Florida Supreme Court modified the rules of evidence, requiring prosecutors to disclose any benefit provided to informants such as reductions of pending charges or requests to shorten sentences, among other reforms. But, as described in a recent Associated Press story, other states have written those safeguards into law and enacted others - including formal tracking of jailhouse informant testimony and increased ability for judges to exclude dubious informant testimony.
Revising laws governing informant testimony should be an easy step toward justice for Florida lawmakers, and one they should take in the upcoming session.
Online: https://www.news-journalonline.com/
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Sept. 20
The South Florida SunSentinel on state legislation that makes it tougher to challenge developers:
The Big Shots own Florida now. If you stand up to them, they will destroy you.
That’s the impact of an appeals court’s wrongheaded ruling on Maggy Hurchalla’s $4.4 million punishment for opposing a billionaire developer’s rock mine in Martin County.
It’s also the intent of a new state law that makes you risk everything if you challenge a development decision. For if you lose, you will be stuck paying the legal fees of the developer and the government.
Gov. Ron DeSantis signed House Bill 7103 into law in May, ignoring the environmental community’s pleas to veto it. “Citizens won’t dare challenge development orders if they risk financial ruin,” warns the environmental champion 1000 Friends of Florida, which has filed suit against the law.
Are Floridians no longer entitled to defend their communities from reckless development? To protect the environment from exploitation? To oppose the high and the mighty on any issue of public policy?
Dramatic as they may appear, these questions do not overstate the dangers emanating from nearly two decades of one-party rule in Tallahassee, where the courts have been politicized and the Legislature turned into a reliable ally of powerful special interests.
In June, the Fourth District Court of Appeal panel that upheld the judgment against Hurchalla brushed off her reasonable request to have the entire court rehear the case en banc, or pass it along to the Florida Supreme Court as a question of great public interest.
She’s going to appeal to the Supreme Court regardless. But a certified question would have helped persuade the justices to take the case.
In stiff-arming her, the Fourth District panel - three judges appointed by Republican governors - also gave the back of its hand to the League of Women Voters, the Sierra Club, the First Amendment Foundation, the ACLU and 12 other organizations and individuals that filed friend-of-the-court briefs on behalf of Hurchalla and the public’s right to free speech on matters of public interest.
Hurchalla, a former four-term Martin County commissioner whose sister was U.S. Attorney Janet Reno, is appealing nationwide for more support from environmentalists, media organizations and anyone else who appreciates the public’s right to speak out on public affairs.
In truth, it’s everyone’s fight, and Hurchalla needs and deserves all the allies she can get.
If the judgment against her stands, it doesn’t mean she’ll have to pay it because she doesn’t have the money. At 78, she owned nothing in her own name but two kayaks and her sister’s 2004 Toyota Camry, which the plaintiff took and eventually gave back.
Hurchalla is fighting for a principle.
A jury had awarded George Lindemann Jr., a billionaire developer, the $4.4 million on the premise of Hurchalla’s “tortious interference” with his contract with the South Florida Water Management District and Martin County. Both agencies settled with him, expensively, and let the project proceed. But Hurchalla refused to issue the apology she was told would put an end to the suit.
Lindemann claimed some of her objections weren’t truthful and that she expressed some of them in private e-mails to public officials whom she knew.
Neither of those arguments should have made a dime’s worth of difference in a controversy over public policy, where most legal precedents rightly favor robust discussion.
It was a classic SLAPP suit. That’s an acronym for “strategic litigation against public participation.” Most courts elsewhere have seen it for what it is and ruled against it.
Not Florida’s.
The effect of letting that judgement stand will be to tell the public this:
If you object to a government deal with someone rich enough to hire sharp lawyers, be very careful of what you say and how you say it. Get one thing wrong and they will make you pay dearly.
In other words, shut up.
Making matters worse, the same Fourth District panel ruled against Hurchalla and the public in a related case Sept. 18, holding that a public agency can forever refuse to disclose anything pertaining to mediations that settle lawsuits. That keeps secret the reasons why the water district agreed to its costly settlement with Lindemann.
That ruling, too, must be appealed.
Meanwhile, 1000 Friends of Florida has filed suit in Circuit Court in Tallahassee to strike down the poisonous part of HB 7103 - a sneaky eleventh-hour amendment from Republican Sen. Jeff Brandes of St. Petersburg that passed without any debate on its diabolical effects.
It says that in a lawsuit over enforcing a community’s comprehensive plan, the losing party must pay the other side’s legal fees. Previously, the winner could be compensated only if the court ruled the complaint to be frivolous or in bad faith.
Loser pays works both ways, of course. But in practice, it’s the developers who can afford the risk and private citizens who can’t.
Citizen action is the only remaining check on runaway development and pliable local officials. 1000 Friends is right to call HB 7103 a “mortal blow to growth management.”
With the courts, the Legislature and the governor’s office all aligned with the Big Shots, Floridians can only hope that somewhere along the way, someone in black robes will remember the Constitution.
Online: https://www.sun-sentinel.com
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Sept. 15
The Palm Beach Post on legislation that would mandate all schools that receive state funding teach about the Holocaust:
With hate crimes on the rise and a high school principal recently questioning the veracity of the genocide of Europe’s Jews, Florida lawmakers should ensure that every school receiving public dollars teaches about the Holocaust.
Florida state Rep. Tina Polsky and state Sen. Kevin Rader have a very good idea. The two lawmakers from Palm Beach County want charter schools and private schools that receive state tuition vouchers to be required to teach about the Holocaust, just as traditional public schools are.
And why not? Those schools receive public money, too. The public, in return, has every reason to expect that those students are given a solid grounding in becoming good citizens.
Polsky and Rader want to build upon Florida’s 25-year-law requiring Holocaust studies in public schools. That law passed with unanimous votes in the Florida House and Senate in 1994, but exempted charters and private schools. This proposed legislation (HB 91 and SB 184) fills an obvious hole in the original measure. It deserves the same bipartisan support that its forebear received.
Teaching all Florida public school students about the Nazis’ program of extermination of European Jewry is not some sop to a particular ethnicity or voting bloc. Rather, it is to protect our democracy’s values that we must ensure that students acquire “an understanding of the ramifications of prejudice, racism and stereotyping,” as the current law puts it.
In our diverse and pluralistic society, it is essential that new generations learn what can happen when minority groups are singled out and scapegoated. In 1930s Germany, the fanning of old hatreds led to a steady escalation of discriminatory laws, to separation into ghettos and camps. Finally, to genocide.
That history must be told and re-told. Last year, the U.S. Jewish community experienced near-historic levels of anti-Semitism (1,879 attacks on Jewish people and institutions), including the single deadliest attack against the Jewish community in history, a gunman’s assault on a Pittsburgh synagogue that left 11 dead.
The same evil spirit echoed this year in a Walmart in El Paso, where a gunman went looking for Hispanics to kill - and slaughtered 22.
It was just two months ago that a Spanish River High School principal in Boca Raton made nationwide news by telling a parent that he couldn’t “say the Holocaust is a factual, historic event” and that his students could opt out of Holocaust classes because “not everyone believes the Holocaust happened.” For a trusted educator to make such remarks was astounding. He justly lost his job.
Unfortunately, there’s enough evidence to suggest that he isn’t alone. Nearly one-third of Americans and 40 percent of Millennials believe that substantially fewer than 6 million Jews were killed during the Holocaust, according to a 2018 survey by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany. That same survey found that 70 percent of respondents believe people care less about the Holocaust than before. Yet 58 percent believe something like the Holocaust could happen again.
The bill from Polsky and Rader would improve Holocaust education in another way, as well: It would direct the Florida Department of Education to create a curriculum. Right now, each school principal can decide how to teach about the atrocities, to widely varying degrees of commitment and enthusiasm.
That’s been the case as well with a similar mandate, also passed in 1994, to “infuse” black history and culture into Florida’s public school curriculum. As we’ve noted before, many educators have ignored this law for years. As Polsky and Rader seek to expand Holocaust studies, they should be open to friendly amendments that will also mainstream black studies throughout the school experience.
Commendably, lawmakers from both parties, reacting to such incidents as the Walmart shooting, have introduced several resolutions condemning white nationalism and white supremacy. They’ll be considered when the Legislature convenes in January.
Recent events make powerfully clear that each generation has a duty to actively battle prejudice and hate. Ron Klein introduced the 1994 Holocaust bill as a Democratic representative from Boca Raton. He put it well.
“Education,” he said then, “is the only way we can learn about the evils man can perpetrate on one another.”
Online: https://www.palmbeachpost.com
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