EDITORIAL: "Moody's objections to DNA testing don't serve justice," published by The Sun Sentinel on June 7, 2021.
PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "Moody’s quarrel with a conscientious prosecutor shows why every state attorney’s office should be required to establish a conviction integrity unit enabled to search for the truth regardless of the technicalities that often get in the way. Of Florida’s 20 state attorneys, only four have them. the Fourth Circuit (Duval, Clay and Nassau counties), the Ninth (Orange and Seminole), the 13th (Hillsborough) and the 17th (Broward). There should also be a statewide innocence commission comparable to the one that has compiled a commendable record in North Carolina. Most of all, Florida needs to abolish the death penalty that makes the stakes in murder cases so fraught with the possibility of killing innocent people. The case for repeal gets stronger every time the state objects to DNA testing, whatever the reason."
PHOTO CAPTION: " Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody speaks during a roundtable discussion with President Donald Trump and law enforcement officials, Monday, June 8, 2020, at the White House in Washington. Moody has recently prevented lawyers for two inmates on Florida's Death Row from getting DNA tests done for their clients, despite prosecutors agreeing to it."
GIST: "A state’s criminal justice system should search relentlessly for truth and justice. Its rules, deadlines and other technicalities should be dedicated to those goals, not to denying them.
Florida has it backward. It’s often not innocence or guilt that matter, but how the game is played, despite the deadly consequences.
Had Attorney General Ashley Moody set out to prove that, she couldn’t have done it more convincingly than with the objections she filed last week to advanced DNA testing for two men who have been on death row since 1976, insisting on their innocence all the while. In both cases, a fair-minded prosecutor had agreed to the tests.
One would hope that every last doubt would be resolved before someone is killed in the guise of justice, especially when a DNA test is feasible. But no, Florida has its rules, and Moody is the enforcer.
The better-known inmate is Tommy Ziegler, 75, whose dubious conviction has been publicized nationally. He owned a Winter Garden furniture store where his wife, her parents and another person were found slain on Christmas Eve 1975, and Ziegler was bleeding from a gunshot wound. From the outset, detectives obsessed on the theory that he had committed the killings for his wife’s life insurance money and had shot himself. They pursued no contrary leads, rejecting Ziegler’s claim of an attack by an intruder. It was a clear example of confirmation bias, a mindset that allows no contradictions.
The other prisoner is Henry Sireci, 72, condemned for the 1975 fatal stabbing of an Orlando used car dealer, Howard Poteet.
Ziegler is the third-longest resident of Florida’s death row and Sireci is the fourth. Ziegler recently survived COVID-19 but his health is fragile.
Both cases find Moody crosswise with a new state attorney, Monique H. Worrell of the Orange-Osceola Circuit, who agreed to release clothing and other evidence to defense attorneys for testing by an independent certified laboratory.
A long-ago predecessor prosecuted both men. Moody is the eighth attorney general who has sought to uphold the convictions and the death sentences.
Her office is asking a judge to block the testing in both cases, arguing Worrell didn’t consult her despite the attorney general being the state’s counsel throughout repeated state and federal appeals. Furthermore, it argues, any further testing should be done by the state’s own crime laboratory.
In both cases, the state has argued that advanced DNA testing wouldn’t exonerate the men even if the results were what the prisoners’ lawyers expect.
But that shouldn’t matter. With death by lethal injection at issue, every possibility of innocence should be investigated and exhausted before a sentence is carried out. It should be up to a judge and perhaps new juries, not the attorney general’s office, to evaluate the strength and sufficiency of any new evidence.
Prior testing, in 1994, found no blood on tiny swatches of Ziegler’s clothes. Now Ziegler argues that advanced testing, which he has been denied six times, would still show none and indicate he didn’t kill any of the victims. Prosecutors would argue that the absence of evidence isn’t evidence.
But if some stranger’s DNA is found on fingernail clippings from Ziegler’s father-in-law, who struggled with someone that night, it would seriously substantiate Ziegler’s claims.
Would the state rather put a potentially innocent man to death than confront the possibility that he was innocent all along?
Sireci’s case turns in part on laboratory evidence, of a sort since scientifically discredited, that a hair found on Poteet’s sock was from Sireci, and that blood on a jacket believed to be Sireci’s matched Poteet’s blood group. DNA findings to the contrary would not necessarily vindicate Sireci, but it would call his conviction into question and raise doubts as to the truthfulness of witnesses who claimed he had admitted the killings.
“This is just about the fact that there have been advancements in DNA science that have produced exonerations,” Worrell told the Tampa Bay Times, “and when you have someone who is charged with murder, particularly someone who has been sentenced to death, I don’t think we have the luxury of ignoring advancements in science that may be able to prove their innocence.”
The voters of the Ninth Circuit can take pride in electing a prosecutor like her. All prosecutors should take to heart what she said. So should the attorney general.
Another serious factor in Ziegler’s case, though not an issue in the argument over testing, is that his jury obviously lacked confidence in their guilty verdict. A majority of them recommended against executing him, despite the four murder victims. They had been split 6-6 on guilt before it came down to one holdout juror, who complained to the judge about the pressure she was under. The judge arranged to have a doctor prescribe valium for her, and she voted to convict. But, years later, she said she still doubted Ziegler’s guilt.
Recent Florida law eliminated a judge’s ability to issue a death sentence in the absence of a unanimous recommendation from the jury. Ziegler is one of two surviving inmates whose judges spurned jury recommendations for life instead of death.
Two others were put to death despite a unanimous mercy recommendation in one man’s case and a 10-2 vote in the other.
On that point alone, the governor should spare Ziegler.
But no Florida governor has commuted a death sentence since Bob Graham in 1983. Subsequent governors have acted — or rather, not acted — as if the criminal justice system were foolproof.
It is not.
Florida’s 30 nation-leading death row exonerations, all resulting from persistent appeals, reveal profound flaws in the process and raise agonizing questions as to how many innocent people have been executed and how many remain on death row.
DNA exonerated Frank Lee Smith, convicted of rape in Broward County, after he had died of cancer. He had been on death row for five years. Joseph Green Brown came within 15 hours of execution for a murder in Tampa before a judge issued a stay. He was exonerated two and a half years later.
Moody’s quarrel with a conscientious prosecutor shows why every state attorney’s office should be required to establish a conviction integrity unit enabled to search for the truth regardless of the technicalities that often get in the way.
Of Florida’s 20 state attorneys, only four have them. the Fourth Circuit (Duval, Clay and Nassau counties), the Ninth (Orange and Seminole), the 13th (Hillsborough) and the 17th (Broward).
There should also be a statewide innocence commission comparable to the one that has compiled a commendable record in North Carolina.
Most of all, Florida needs to abolish the death penalty that makes the stakes in murder cases so fraught with the possibility of killing innocent people. The case for repeal gets stronger every time the state objects to DNA testing, whatever the reason."
The entire editorial can be read at:
