Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Hey, Kelsey Grammer! If Amendment 6 were in place, innocent people would now be dead
Florida legislators are good at rejecting “lawyer relief ” bills, their term for legislation they suspect would generate more legal fees than public benefits.
But the Constitution Revision Commission was naïve in that respect, which accounts for the presence of Amendment 6 — the so-called “Marsy’s Law” — on the Nov. 6 ballot.
So was the majority in the 4-3 Florida Supreme Court decision that left it on the ballot.
When the court belatedly published its reasons Thursday, Justice Barbara Pariente’s dissent spelled out why voters would be wise to reject the proposal, which is beguilingly — and misleadingly — entitled “Rights of crime victims, judges.”
What the language doesn’t say is that the measure also is aimed at extinguishing defendants’ rights, such as sufficient time to prepare for a fair trial. Neither does it mention that most of its long list of victims’ benefits are already in Florida law, thanks to a victim’s rights amendment adopted 30 years ago.
Section 16 of Article I provides explicitly for victims or their survivors to be heard “when relevant” at all stages of criminal proceedings, “to the extent that these rights do not interfere with the constitutional rights of the accused.” It’s that last part that Amendment 6 would erase — without revealing that to the voters.
Because the right to a fair trial is established in both the federal and state Constitutions, Amendment 6 would guarantee endless and expensive litigation.
“I have genuine concerns,” Pariente wrote, “that the new, comprehensive manual of victims’ rights created by Amendment 6 would, in fact, impact our criminal justice system and the rights of the accused. At the least, these changes will likely cause a wave of litigation in which the courts will be asked to resolve conflicts between victims’ and defendants’ enumerated constitutional rights — including defendants’ constitutional rights to speedy trial, due process, and confrontation.
“The ballot summary conspicuously fails to tell voters that victims’ rights already exist in the Florida Constitution and, rather than ‘creating’ rights, Amendment 6 actually defines and expends these existing rights into a laundry list of rights that are to be placed on equal footing with the constitutional rights of the accused.”
She also objected that the revision commission rolled entirely unrelated subjects into the amendment and chided the majority for going along with it. That bundling — or logrolling, as the method is traditionally known — is a bait-and-switch scheme that doesn’t play fair with the voters. Among the many consequences it fails to mention are potential erasures in the public records law and in the special procedures established for juvenile courts.
As Pariente acknowledged, every citizen can easily imagine becoming a crime victim, as so many already have. What also bears remembering, though, is that every citizen is also vulnerable to being wrongly accused of crime. The fact that 27 people have been freed from Florida’s death row after they were exonerated underscores the urgency of fair trials and fair appeals. And of course, every citizen is also a taxpayer, with a vested interest in avoiding “reforms” that would generate new waves of litigation.
Here are two of the ways in which “Marsy’s Law” messes with the system. Florida’s speedy trial rule presently entitles the defendant to a trial within 90 days for a misdemeanor and 175 days — just short of six months — for a felony, unless the deadline is extended for good reason. In practice, murder charges and other serious cases often require more. Amendment 6, however, would allow the prosecution and
also the victims — to demand a trial within 60 days unless the trial judge enters an order “justifying a later trial date.”
It also sets limits of two years in most cases — and five years in capital cases — on the completion of “all” state-level appeals and collateral attacks.
Here again, the courts would have to issue orders explaining noncompliance and would be required to report annually to the Legislature on a case-by-case basis.
Such deadlines are wildly impractical. Applied to past cases, they would have cost the lives of most, if not all, of the death row prisoners who lived long enough to be found innocent. (DNA exonerated one after his death from natural causes.)
Florida and federal rules set deadlines on when all forms of appeals must be filed — which make it difficult to reopen cases involving new evidence — but not on how long for the courts to complete them. That is a critical difference.
It’s offensive that a victims’ rights proposal originally aimed at conditions in California is being forced on voters in other states whose constitutions and laws are markedly different.
It’s the work of a California billionaire, Henry Nicholas, who financed it as a voter initiative after his sister was murdered and her accused killer was released on bail with no notice to the family. He’s sold it to five other states. It is presently on ballots in Georgia and North Carolina, as well as in Florida, where Nicholas has spent nearly $30 million to promote it.
The campaign features TV spots by Kelsey Grammer, the lead actor in the
Frasier television series, who speaks movingly of his father’s murder and the rape and murder of his sister and of the failure of those jurisdictions to keep him informed. But those tragedies happened elsewhere, in St. Thomas and Colorado. Grammer does not appear to have any specific knowledge of what happens in Florida.
It cannot be doubted that Florida prosecutors and correctional authorities occasionally overlook their existing duty to inform victims of such key events as the setting or postponement of a trial or the escape or impending release of a perpetrator. Such failures should be reported, as appropriate, to the state attorney, the chief judge of a circuit, the governor or the Legislature, all of whom have the means and the duty to deal with them.
In no way, though, do these justify writing into the Constitution a code so elaborate as to burden officials with providing notice at every conceivable stage, including the status conferences that courts routinely conduct with the defense and prosecution. As those are public proceedings, notice would have to be sent to everyone even with dozens of cases on the day’s docket, making unnecessary work for clerks and secretaries.
A one-size-fits-all approach to criminal justice has no proper place in a federal system where each state makes and enforces its own rules. Florida is not California, an important point for our citizens to make in voting “NO” to Amendment 6.
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, David Lyons and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson.