FADP in Action!
Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty works for restorative justice in the form of effective alternatives to the death penalty.
Launch of the Florida Moratorium Campaign
On 18 December 2000, Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty launched it’s Florida Moratorium Campaign. A press conference was held in Miami simultaneously with events in New York City and Rome. Press reports are as replicated below.
Thanks to Howard Simon of the Florida ACLU for providing the space, Carolyn Gray for doing much of the prep work, Len Kaminsky for meeting me at the airport and for other invaluable assistance, Walter Moore, who distributed the press release in Tallahassee, and to all who participated, including:
- Gerald Kogan, Retired Florida Supreme Court Chief Justice and co-chair of of the National Committee to Prevent Wrongful Executions
- Sammy Diaz, representing the Florida Catholic Conference
- Freddie Pitts, Board Member, National Legal Aid and Defender Association, and Florida Death Row Survivor
- SueZann Bosler, Board Member, Journey of Hope …From Violence to Healing, and member of Murder Victim’s Families for Reconciliation
- Fred Eisinger, Executive Director, Seagull Industries for the Disabled, also representing the Florida Association of Retarded Citizens and Board Member, Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty
- Randy Berg, Executive Director of the Florida Justice Institute
- Howard Simon, Executive Director of the Florida ACLU
- Jeff Walsh, investigator in the Smith Case
- David Mack, who also worked on the Smith case and represents the Tallahassee chapter of the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition.
There were also several folks from the Miami University law school and Pax Christi members from Broward, Miami and Haiti.
Below is an AP story from events in New York, as well as articles from the Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel and the Miami Herald. Miami’s Channel six showed up too. SO, if you see any coverage in your local paper, or the Op-Ed I sent last week, or editorials written by your paper or others on this matter, please let me know and PICK UP several copies for FADP’s clipping file and archives. OK? Please? Thanks!
First, before the news, I want to share with you the comments of Rev. Fred Morris of the Florida Council of Churches, who was unable to make it:
>Dear Abe,
>[…]
>Please feel free to state on my behalf that the Florida Council of Churches
>supports the Moratorium 100% and that we pray that our society will rise
>above our traditional desire for vengeance and instead start with a basic
>search for justice–especially for those who are being victimized by our
>current system–the poor and people of color.
>
>We also want to remind our constituency that forgiveness, however difficult,
>is a central part of our tradition and that vengeance has no place in
>anyone’s religious life.
>
>Again, sorry I can’t be with you all.
>
>Fred
And now the news, replicated here in all its glory, WITHOUT permission from the corporate entities who make their money from reporting the misery of the world. Have a lovely day!
–abe
ACTIVISTS URGE HALT TO DEATH PENALTY
EX-JUSTICE, LAWYERS TO JOIN MIAMI EVENT
Published: Monday, December 18, 2000
Section: LOCAL
Page: 6B
By PAULA McMAHON Staff Writer
Days after DNA testing exonerated a Fort Lauderdale man who died on Death Row, a prominent group of anti-death penalty
activists will call for a moratorium on executions in Florida today at a news conference in Miami.
Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty planned the event before news broke that Frank Lee Smith had been cleared of the 1985 rape and murder of 8-year-old Shandra Whitehead.
But the group’s director, Abe Bonowitz, said he hopes that people who were shocked by the fact that Smith spent 14 years in prison awaiting execution for a crime he did not commit will campaign against the use of the death penalty.
“It’s sad this had to happen, but hopefully it will make people think about the death penalty,” Bonowitz said.
The group supports Florida’s “life means life” prison sentences and initiatives that would force prisoners to work to pay for their incarceration and to pay restitution to their victims’ families.
Among those who will join the call in Miami are retired Florida Supreme Court Chief Justice Gerald Kogan.
Also attending will be Geoffrey Smith, a Tallahassee attorney, who worked on Frank Lee Smith’s case along with several lawyers, including Barry Scheck of the Innocence Project, a New-York based group that works to clear Death Row inmates in cases where DNA testing could overturn the person’s conviction. Jeff Walsh, a defense investigator who pursued the case for years, will also be there.
Frank Lee Smith, 52, died of cancer in prison in January, having always maintained that he was not involved in the murder of Shandra. Eddie Lee Mosley, one of the original suspects in the case, is now the main suspect in Shandra’s death, police and prosecutors said.
Paula McMahon can be reached at [email protected] or 954-356-4533
******
Sun Sentinel 12/19/2000
Activists urge end to death penalty
By DAMIAN P. GREGORY
Web-posted: 10:03 p.m. Dec. 18, 2000
MIAMI — Pointing to the case of a Broward County man who died on Death Row and was later exonerated by DNA testing, several prominent legal and civil rights advocates on Monday joined in the call to end executions in the state.
Frank Lee Smith was convicted and sentenced to death in 1986 for the murder of Shandra Whitehead, 8, of Fort Lauderdale. He died of cancer 11 months ago, before DNA testing proved his innocence.
“Bottom line, this is the story of an impoverished, powerless, mentally ill African-American man who was snatched off the street and wrongfully convicted and sentenced to die by a handful of less-than-honest white people with a lot of power,” said Jeff Walsh, one of the investigators who helped clear Smith’s name. “Now is the time to issue a moratorium and fully investigate why it is that these things happen in Florida.”
Smith’s case, opponents of the death penalty say, underscores the flaws in the system that may lead to the execution of the innocent. The Miami gathering Monday, sponsored by the Palm Beach County-based Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, is part of an effort dubbed Moratorium 2000, a grassroots campaign to halt the death penalty in Florida and around the world.
A petition with an estimated 2.7 million signatures was presented to United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan in New York at the time of the Miami gathering in hopes of getting him to join the effort. The anti-death penalty group is developing a Web site where Floridians will be able to sign a similar petition online.
For advocates of the moratorium, Gov. Jeb Bush’s proposal to conduct DNA testing in death penalty cases is not the solution to eliminate cases like Smith’s.
“It is a shortsighted attempt to put a Band-Aid on a festering wound,” said Abe Bonowitz, director of
Floridians Against the Death Penalty. “DNA testing only works where there is some physical evidence to test. It also does not eliminate many of the other problems that were also present in the Frank Lee Smith case.”
Gerald Kogan, former Florida Supreme Court chief justice, is one of those urging a moratorium.
“Innocent people are convicted every day in this country,” Kogan said. “A civilized society cannot say that it is in fact civilized or humane when it permits a system to exist that can result in the wrongful execution of innocent people.”
The group supports Florida’s “life means life” prison sentences and initiatives that would force prisoners to work to pay for their incarceration and to pay restitution to their victims’ families.
*****
AP – 12/18/2000
USA/UNITED NATIONS:
Secretary-General Kofi Annan lent his support to a worldwide moratorium on the death penalty Monday after receiving a petition signed by 3.2 million people seeking an end to state-sponsored executions.
Activist Sister Helen Prejean, representatives of Amnesty International, and a Rome-based interfaith group, the Sant’ Egidio Community, delivered the petition as demonstrators outside U.N. headquarters rallied to end capital punishment.
“We are right now at a new moment in terms of the American people’s recognition that the death penalty does not serve us as a country,” said Prejean, whose work as a spiritual adviser to a death row inmate was depicted in the 1995 film “Dead Man Walking.”
“A moral threshold has been crossed,” she said.
Prejean said the petition is aimed at pressing the U.N. General Assembly to pass a resolution halting executions, then eventually banning them.
Amnesty International Chairman Paul Hoffman cited the fact that while fewer than 30 countries had abolished the death penalty in 1970, more than 110 have such bans today.
At Monday’s ceremony, Annan backed the campaign, questioning how the taking of one life can justify taking another.
“Can the state, which represents the whole of society and has the duty of protecting society, fulfill that duty by lowering itself to the level of the murderer, and treating him as he treated others?” Annan said.
Annan praised the countries which have signed a protocol aiming to abolish the death penalty worldwide.
“If I may be permitted to express a personal view, I believe that those states are right,” he said. “The forfeiture of life is too absolute, too irreversible, for one human being to inflict it on another, even when backed by legal process. And I believe that future generations, throughout the world, will come to agree.”
As governor of Texas, President-elect Bush presided over nearly 150 executions. In 2000 alone, 40 people were put to death in Texas, the most of any state in U.S. history.
Prejean acknowledged that changing public perception of capital punishment in the United States is one of the biggest challenges facing the anti-death penalty movement.
Prejean argued against the position that capital punishment serves as a deterrent to crime, and that executions provide justice for the families of murder victims.
*****
Miami Herald – 12/19/2000
Published Tuesday, December 19, 2000, in the Miami Herald
Execution moratorium proposed
Citing recent DNA reversals, groups petition Florida
governor
BY ANDREA McDANIELS
[email protected]
Former Florida Supreme Court Justice Gerald Kogan joined a dozen death-penalty opponents Monday in urging Gov. Jeb Bush to issue a moratorium on executions in the state.
The news conference, organized by Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, came a week after DNA tests cleared a Broward County man who spent 14 years on Death Row. Frank Lee Smith died of cancer in prison 11 months ago; he was convicted of raping and killing a 6-year-old girl.
The conference coincided with the presentation of a petition signed by 2.7 million death-penalty opponents to the United Nations calling for a moratorium on executions.
“The [Smith] case opens up a door a little more to show people what problems there are with the death penalty,” Kogan said at the Chesterfield Smith Center for Equal Justice in Miami. “Innocent people are convicted every day. At least by getting a moratorium, we can sit down and discuss this matter.”
Of the 89 people released from Death Row since the Supreme Court allowed states to reimpose the death penalty in 1975, 10 were cleared through DNA evidence, said Kogan, co-chairman of the National Committee to Prevent Wrongful Executions.
He added that DNA evidence is usually available only in rape cases.
Jeff Walsh, an investigator in Smith’s case, said he visited Smith in the prison hospital where he found him “strapped to a gurney, writhing in pain, rolling in his own waste, begging me to help him.”
“The state executed Frank Lee Smith” by denying him adequate medical care because he was slated to die anyway, Walsh said. Smith would be alive today had the DNA evidence been examined before, rather than after, his death, he said.
Freddie Pitts, freed by evidence discovered by The Herald after 9 1/2 years on Death Row in Florida, agreed. He said death-penalty advocates think executing an innocent person “is the price we have to pay for justice.”
“Would you feel the same way if that was your brother or your son?” asked Pitts, board member of the National Legal Aid and Defender Association.
Florida has executed 48 prisoners since resuming capital punishment in 1979, five of them since Bush took office last year.
Representatives of the Florida Catholic Conference urged that all Death Row inmates should receive DNA testing, citing Florida’s high reversal rate.
Others present included members of the American Civil Liberties Union, Murder Victim’s Families for Reconciliation and Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow/PUSH Coalition. Click Image to View Full Size 
