Florida Supreme Court Limits Enforcement of Supreme Court Decision Barring Execution of Intellectually Disabled Prisoners

For the third time in 2020, the Florida Supreme Court has reduced the constitutional protections afforded to death-row prisoners. In a May 21 decision in Phillips v. State, the court overturned its own case precedent and limited enforcement of a U.S. Supreme Court case that bars execution of intellectually disabled prisoners. Dissenting Justice Jorge Labarga wrote, “Yet again, this Court has removed an important safeguard in maintaining the integrity of Florida’s death penalty jurisprudence. The result is an increased risk that certain individuals may be executed, even if they are intellectually disabled.”

Harry Phillips (pictured) may be one of those individuals.

Poll Finds Record-Low Support for Death Penalty Among Houstonians

Just 20% of Houstonians — a record low — now support the death penalty over life-sentencing alternatives, a new Rice University survey has found. The 2020 Houston Area Survey by the Kinder Institute for Urban Research, released on May 4, 2020, found that death-penalty support has declined by more than half since the turn of the 21st century in the city of 2.3 million residents.

The survey results are noteworthy because Houston comprises 50% of the population Harris County, Texas, a county that has accounted for more than twice as many executions in the past half century as any other county in the United States.

The 2020 survey was conducted during February and early March of 2020, “before there were clear signs of an impending [coronavirus] crisis,” the Institute said. The researchers asked Houston residents to choose which among three sentencing alternatives they believed was most appropriate for persons convicted of first-degree murder:  ”the death penalty, life imprisonment with no chance for parole, or life imprisonment with a chance for parole after 25 years.” They reported that “the percentage choosing capital punishment dropped from 41 percent in 2000, to 37 percent in 2010, to 27 percent in 2016, and to 20 percent in this year’s survey.” (To enlarge graphic, click here.) In 1993, 75% of Houstonians said they were in favor of the death penalty. In the 2019 Kinder survey, those who said they were in favor of capital punishment had declined to 56%.

The survey linked respondents’ death-penalty attitudes to broader shifts in opinions on crime and punishment. Just 11% of residents named crime as the biggest problem facing Houston — the lowest number in the 39 years of the survey. The percentage who said they were very worried about being a victim of crime also hit a record low, at 17%. Houstonians’ support for harsh punishments for low-level drug crimes also declined. Most respondents (70%) said possession of small amounts of marijuana should not be a criminal offense, a major shift since the question was last asked in 2003, when a 56% majority said marijuana possession should be criminalized. “The decline in punitiveness is consistent with the other evidence showing the growth in empathy and in the acceptance of differences that seems to be developing among Houston area residents,” the report’s authors wrote.

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