Florida Supreme Court continues its death march
Danny Lee Doyle came as a child to Broward County, where a former neighbor said she “never met a person in the world more mentally incompetent…”, and where he raped and killed another neighbor in 1981. A year later, Doyle went to Florida’s death row, where he has spent nearly two thirds of his 58 years on earth.
At issue now is not the question of his guilt, but whether he should be executed. There are two serious reasons why he should not be.
Had the same jury convicted him for the same crime today, he would be serving life without the possibility of parole. Florida law now requires juries to be unanimous in sentencing someone to death. Four of Doyle’s jurors voted for life, most likely because they recognized his mental disability. But the Legislature and the Florida Supreme Court refuse to make today’s standard retroactive to many of the 347 people on death row.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2002 that it is unconstitutional to execute mentally disabled people, but allows states to decide what constitutes sufficient mental disability. There is more than ample evidence in Doyle’s case, including the Broward school system’s inability to advance him beyond a third-grade level. After eight years in an exceptional student program, a psychologist wrote when Doyle was 15, he “did not know what a stomach was for, could not recite the alphabet or spell anything more complex than ‘cat,’ did not know what oil was, could not define ‘America,’ and when asked to define ‘nuisance,’ said he thought it was the name of a horse he knew.”
His disability was argued in a string of appeals to state and federal courts. All failed, but that was before the high court ruled that the mentally disabled “do not act with the level of moral culpability that characterizes the most serious adult criminal conduct.” The resentencing issue now sits squarely before Broward Circuit Judge Edward Merrigan Jr. on yet another post-conviction motion. No reason comes to mind why Merrigan should not resentence Doyle to life.
It should never have come to this. In 1994, Gov. Lawton Chiles was willing to commute Doyle’s sentence to life without parole, but couldn’t get three fellow Cabinet members to join him. Instead, they postponed action for 25 years, leaving Doyle on death row, where only 23 men have been there longer.
It is noteworthy that no governor since Bob Graham in 1983 has commuted a death sentence to life without parole. There have, however, been 95 executions. Jeb Bush was the last governor to even hold a hearing on a plea for mercy. His successors have been as silent as the Sphinx on what thought — if any — they’ve given to it.
An issue as great as Doyle’s mental disability is the persistent refusal of Florida’s Supreme Court to apply the concept of equal justice to prisoners condemned under Florida’s old law, which did not require a unanimous jury verdict to sentence someone to death. Neither did it require jurors to say what aggravating factors justified execution. Judges were left to reach their own conclusions.
In 2002, however, the Supreme Court’s ruling in a case known as Ring v. Arizona should have put Florida on notice to change that. Ring held that a jury, not the judge, must find every fact applied to increase the severity of a sentence.
In 2016, the Constitution finally caught up with Florida. Ruling in favor of Timothy Hurst, a murderer from Pensacola, the high court held that the Sixth Amendment “requires a jury, not a judge, to find each fact necessary to impose a sentence of death.” But the court left it to the state to determine how far back to apply that standard, if at all.
Since then, the Florida Supreme Court has become a death factory, refusing to apply the Hurst decision to any sentence that became “final” before the 2002 ruling.
Justice Barbara Pariente dissented to the precedent and continues to hold that it was wrong to distinguish so arbitrarily among prisoners whose cases are similar in every regard except the year in which they exhausted their initial appeals.
“This case cries out for a resentencing by a jury in light of Hurst,” she wrote.
The court has now reaffirmed about a hundred death sentences that it should have sent back for new sentencing hearings in light of the Hurst case. Doyle’s was one of four cases so wrongly decided this week. The court said that because Doyle’s sentence became final in 1985, Hurst does not apply retroactively.
Doyle’s only hope is for Judge Merrigan to uphold the other 2002 court ruling that says it’s unconstitutional to execute mentally disabled people.
The court and Attorney General Pam Bondi are wrong to insist on Doyle’s death. Granted, the murder of Pamela Kipp, a 19-year-old nursing student, was a horrible event. Her family’s plea for execution, at the hearing Chiles held, is understandable.
However, society does not benefit when anyone, especially someone so mentally disabled, is put to death by a court-contrived technicality.
Editorials are the opinion of the Sun Sentinel Editorial Board and written by one of its members or a designee. The Editorial Board consists of Editorial Page Editor Rosemary O’Hara, Andy Reid and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson.