STORMS ON THE HORIZON

 Tuesday this week brings a full moon and high tides.  Wednesday brings a tropical storm to South Florida. Thursday brings snorkeling trips to Ocean Drive and Collins Avenue. "Dive The Clevelander!"

The storms we worry more about are what occurred in Broward in the Parkland shooting case. The defense team was personally attacked, and a hack-judge who presided over a case she was woefully unprepared for in intellectual ability and experience, allowed it to occur. 

Ed Cowart, perhaps the smartest and most able trial judge ever to wear a robe in the REGJB presided over the Ted Bundy trial. Now we have some inexperienced robe wearer who is representative of a gaggle of lower mediocrity that now populates a majority of the desks that sit several feet above the rest of the participants in a courtroom, presiding over the largest school shooting in American history. Did Broward put forth its best and brightest? Surely even that bench, populated by Miami hating judges, had someone, anyone, with more experience in death penalty cases. 

But here is the storm that is brewing. The defense won. And that is a no-no with serious ramifications. How do we know this? John Hinckley shot President Reagan on television and was acquitted using the insanity defense. So Congress gutted the insanity defense and because Hinkley shot Reagan, thousands of mentally ill people were incarcerated over the next forty years. 

Every week in Florida some two-bit thug who shoots a store clerk in a robbery or kills a neighbor in a fit of jealously gets sentenced to death. No headlines. No reports. A good percentage of them- probably ten percent- maybe as a high as twenty percent - are innocent. But off to death row they go.

 But the public thinks Florida juries are made up of lily livered pinko-commie killer-loving jurors, and that means there is a big storm on the horizon for death penalty defense in the state home to the next republican nominee for president.  No one wins elections by advocating equality and sanity in the sentencing of criminals. Plenty of people win elections by promising to take sentencing away from liberal judges, abolish parole and early release, and seek the death penalty on crimes ranging from illegally watering your lawn to possession of an undersized snook. 

Just watch. 

This is from our post on the Hinkley case. You can read the whole exceptionally well written post here. 

After the Hinckley verdict, the insanity defense was changed by Congress and most States,  after 85% of the American public opined that justice was not done in the Hinckley trial. The changes to the insanity defense included shifting the burden to the defendant, and raising the standard of proof so that now insanity meant suffering from a severe mental disease such that the defendant could not appreciate the nature and quality of the wrongfulness of his or her acts. In other words, if a defendant heard voices telling her to kill, so long as she knew the killing was wrong, she was not insane no matter what the voices told her to do.  Insanity was no longer just about the inability to form intent, it now meant that it had to be a total lack of understanding the nature and result of the actus reus.