On Friday, July 2, the Chief Justice of the Florida Supreme Court, Charles Canady, entered an order officially creating Florida’s Innocence Commission. This is a wonderful development in criminal law in Florida. The order does not contain any particularly new information, but does highlight certain aspects of the Commission, particularly that the Commission will only review cases where innocence has been officially acknowledged in an effort to determine the causes of wrongful convictions.
The Commission is authorized to interview individuals involved with cases, review documents and essentially undertake whatever investigation is necessary to fulfill its mandate. The members of the Commission come from all over the state and at first glance seem to come from many different walks of life, hopefully bringing significant skill and determination to their posts.
As a former assistant public defender, I suggest that funding for Public Defender’s Offices is one of the first issues the Commission should look at. Attracting and keeping well qualified and concerned attorneys to indigent defense would be a major hurdle in the battle against wrongful conviction.
There’s a great op/ed piece in the St. Pete Times today (the print edition, anyway), written by an undergraduate at Florida State, discussing the need for an Innocence Commission in Florida. There is $200,000 appropriated in the pending budget for such a commission, which would be charged with sorting out why so many people are wrongly convicted and also proposing methods for ensuring that innocent people do not serve prison sentences for crimes they didn’t commit.
This is actually a big problem in Florida. The writer, Chelsea Enright, cites a frightening number, stating that at least 21 cases that have resulted in exonerations, most in the last 10 years. As public lawyers are overworked and underpaid everywhere in America, I’m personally quite sure it’s an issue nationwide, but Florida has created severe sentencing laws that compound the problem. When someone who has been in trouble before is convicted of a new, serious felony, the likelihood of that person serving a very lengthy prison sentence is high. HFO, VCC, PRR, etc. There are a lot of scary acronyms to learn when practicing criminal law in Florida.
Florida’s lawyers have already signed on to the Innocence Commission, with the Florida Bar’s Board of Governors publicly supporting creation of such an entity. Now, the matter is in the hands of Governor Crist.