FLORIDA:

Unsealing FBI laboratory records being used in an appeal by death row inmate Judy Buenoano would compromise privacy rights, national security
and active criminal investigations, a Justice Department lawyer argued.
Lucy Thomson urged the Florida Supreme Court to overrule an Orlando judge's decision to let the public and news organizations view the 10 sensitive documents.
The records remain sealed pending the court's ruling.
"Release of the documents could jeopardize a confidential relationship which the FBI has with a foreign government concerning the conduct of
national security and criminal investigations," Thomson told the justices.
David Bralow, a lawyer for The Orlando Sentinel and New York Times Regional Newspapers, replied that Circuit Judge Reginald K. Whitehead
already had reviewed the documents and found that making them public would do no harm to the government nor violate privacy rights.
The files are part of the court record in Buenoano's case and, therefore, should be public, Bralow argued.
Prosecutors had accidentally put them in the record for a week before obtaining a temporary order to seal them. No member of the public,
including reporters, viewed them in that time.
Buenoano, dubbed the "black widow" by prosecutors, is scheduled for execution March 30 for the 1971 arsenic poisoning death of her husband in Orlando.
She also has been convicted for later drowning her disabled 19-year-old son in a Florida Panhandle river and attempting to kill her fiance with a car bomb in downtown Pensacola.
Buenoano, who last lived in Gulf Breeze, a Pensacola suburb, would be the first woman executed in Florida in 150 years if her appeal fails.
Although one of Buenoano's lawyers, Sylvia Smith, joined Bralow in arguing for public access, Chief Justice Gerald Kogan questioned what
difference that would make in her appeal. He noted her lawyers already have copies of the documents.
Smith said she was worried that permanently sealing the records might bar Buenoano's family from having access to them, prevent lawyers from
discussing them in court or require the defense to give up its copies.
Thompson said Buenoano's lawyers could retain their copies even if the Supreme Court keeps them sealed.
Defense attorneys believe the documents will show flaws in crime laboratory evidence used to help convict Buenoano. The files include information from a Justice Department investigation of the FBI crime laboratory that questioned the skills and methods of Roger Martz, chief of the chemistry toxicology unit.
Bralow pointed out the Justice Department had an opportunity to make its case about sealing the records during a hearing before Whitehead but failed to do so.
Instead, state prosecutors argued on the federal government's behalf but Bralow said they offered only generalities rather than the specific statements Thomson made to the Supreme Court.
"The national security of the United States of America [is at issue] and you would not present this to a trial court that has the ability to make this public?" Justice Harry Anstead asked Thomson.
She replied that in other cases, courts have kept such records sealed based on arguments states have made on the federal government's behalf.



Lawmakers to retain electric chair

A debate over alternatives to Florida's electric chair has ended with legislators intent on resuming executions stalled since the chair malfunctioned when last used nearly a year ago.
"Dead is dead," said Sen. Ron Klein, D-Boca Raton. "Whether we do it by lethal injection or the electric chair, we need to do it."
Only if the chair at Florida State Prison near Starke eventually is found unconstitutional will the state switch to lethal injection of poisons for
convicts on Death Row, under a bill that senators debated Thursday.
The House is ready to approve a similar bill today; the Senate plans its own vote Monday afternoon.
Although 32 other states have opted for lethal injection -- leaving Florida among 6 relying on an electric chair -- legislative leaders say they fear that any change in Florida will open new avenues of appeals for condemned convicts, who already avert execution with years of appeals.
Legislators have refused to offer the 380 condemned men and women on Death Row a choice of the chair or needle. Sen. Fred Dudley, R-Cape
Coral, says this stems in part from :"an unwillingness on the part of many like myself to give a choice to people who didn't give a choice to their victims."
Although Klein and others proposed offering convicts a choice, they say they are satisfied that the chair functions fine and is constitutional.
Some legislators, however, have tried to make the lethal injection the only method of execution.
"Ladies and gentlemen, we retire judges when they're 70. . . . It's time to retire the electric chair. It's 75 years old," Rep. Tracy Stafford, D-Wilton Manors, told the House during floor debate on Wednesday.
The last execution, Pedro Medina on March 25, opened a yearlong debate over the chair. Flames erupted from the death mask over Medina's head in
an incident reminiscent of the smoking execution of Jesse Tafero in 1990.
Lawyers for Leo Jones, convicted of shooting a Jacksonville police officer in 1981 and next in line for execution, challenged the constitutionality of the chair, alleging that it resulted in cruel and unusual punishment.
The state Supreme Court upheld the chair's use, ruling 4-3 that death by electrocution is swift and painless, regardless of the mishaps that have
occurred. At the same time, five justices advised the Legislature to consider an alternative.
The Senate bill (S 360), similar to one that cleared debate in the House earlier this week (H 3033), saves lethal injection as an alternative only
if a court decided to retire Florida's chair.
"Lethal injection will only kick in once electrocution is ruled unconstitutional, if it ever is," said Senate Criminal Justice Chairman
Al Gutman, R-Miami. "This could be years down the road."

(Source for both stories: Miami Herald)