FL and the use of the electric chair
Date: 7. januar 1998 19:13

House Speaker Daniel Webster backs a proposal to keep the electric chair and switch to lethal injection only if a court rules electrocution is unconstitutional.
The full Senate passed a similar plan during a special legislative session on education in November. House leaders, however, said they would wait until this year to take up the issue, which surfaced after a foot-long flame shot out during Florida's last electrocution last March.
House leaders have written an amendment with language designed to protect death sentences from being overturned because a method of execution has been ruled unconstitutional.
"The speaker basically is in agreement with the concepts," spokeswoman Kathy Mears said Tuesday.
The state Supreme Court ruled 4-3 in October that death in Florida's 74-year-old electric chair was not cruel or unusual punishment. But at the same time 5 of the 7 justices urged lawmakers to consider allowing lethal injection as well as electrocution.
Failure to do so could threaten the death sentences of some 380 condemned killers now on death row, some of the justices warned.
Gov. Lawton Chiles has scheduled 4 executions for an 8-day period in late March, a few weeks after the legislature begins its annual 2-month session. When the governor scheduled the executions last fall, he urged lawmakers to consider the court's recommendation.
The House language was offered by Rep. Victor Crist, a Temple Terrace Republican who chairs the House Justice Council. The Crime and Punishment Committee will vote on the proposal next month, Chairman Randy John Ball, R-Mims, said Tuesday.
"We've got 380 people sitting on death row," Crist said, adding that most have been there an average of 12 to 15 years.
"We wanted to make sure that they weren't given additional possible options for additional appeals," Crist said. "And the way this was crafted this should get the job done."
The language will be inserted into a bill by Rep. Tracy Stafford that now calls for executing future death row inmates by lethal injection and giving current death row inmates a choice between lethal injection and the chair.
Stafford, D-Wilton Manors, said he may consider offering an amendment to Crist's proposal to allow lethal injection for future death row inmates.
Also Tuesday, the state Supreme Court listened to comments on a judicial rule it has proposed to create standards for private attorneys appointed by trial judges to represent defendants in capital murder trials.
Under the proposal, private attorneys who sign up to be on a list of lawyers available for court appointment in capital cases would have to have 5 years experience in criminal cases as well as take seminars about capital punishment.
Another provision would require judges to appoint an additional attorney to work on the case if requested by the lead counsel.
First District Judge Philip Padovano, who worked on the court-appointed committee that drafted the rule, defended the idea of mandating a 2nd attorney.
"No one would argue that we should have only 1 surgeon performing brain surgery because after all the surgeon is a medical doctor or that 1 pilot should fly a jetliner because after all the pilot has a pilot's license," Padovano said. "There are some things in our society that require additional help."
But Carolyn Snurkowski, an assistant deputy attorney general, spoke in opposition of the rule, arguing it created a new right for accused killers.
David De La Paz, an attorney representing Crist, told the court didn't have the authority to pass the rule, which was a policy matter for the legislature to deal with.
"The rule...will violate separation of powers in that in it you crate an additional substantive right,: he said.

(source: Associated Press)