Orlando Sentinel. October 13, 2022.

Editorial: A jury that acted without fear or favor

The crucial question at the Parkland killer’s sentencing trial wasn’t expressed in so many words on the elaborate verdict forms that took more than an hour to read in court Thursday.

Rather, it was how Chief Assistant Public Defender Melisa McNeill phrased it to the jury.

“In a civilized society, do we kill brain-damaged, mentally ill, broken people?” she asked.

Seventeen times, the jury answered “No.”

Painful as it is, it was the right answer.

It surely does not seem so to the families of Nikolas Cruz’s 17 victims, whose grief is without end. Their suffering deserves our sympathy and respect.

But a death sentence for Cruz would only have prolonged their search for closure. The four-plus years it took to get the Parkland massacre to trial would have been a prelude to many more years, if not decades, of appeals, with an uncertain outcome.

Instead, it’s over but for a formal sentencing hearing scheduled for Nov. 1. That will be 17 consecutive life sentences without parole added to the 17 he’s already serving for the victims who survived at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on Feb. 14, 2018.

This could have been the outcome from the outset. But the prosecution rejected the defense’s proposed plea bargain offers that began two days after the killings. Cruz pleaded guilty anyway. His life expectancy in prison may actually be shorter than if the jury had enabled the trial judge, Elizabeth Scherer, to sentence him to death. Like other infamous killers of children, he will be a target of other convicts, and the Department of Corrections will likely need to isolate him.

A lingering question

One question above all lingers after this act of pure evil: If this killer doesn’t deserve death, who does?

Among the 305 people on death row in Florida are people who committed solitary murders, sometimes during a robbery where they had not planned to kill. It abounds with people whose guilt is hardly as clear-cut as his is. Some are arguably as mentally ill as he appears to be, if not more so. In 30 cases, people on death row were exonerated, more than in any other state.

None of America’s death penalty jurisdictions can get it right. The only solution is to abolish it.

Former Florida Supreme Court Justice James E. C. Perry, in his last dissent, noted that 70% of those who were executed in Florida were Blacks who killed whites. In that case, the court’s majority refused to apply retroactively a landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling requiring Florida juries to unanimously find at least one of the reasons, known as aggravating factors, that make a defendant eligible for the death penalty.

The Florida court picked an arbitrary date to apply it. But it had already held that new sentences, like Cruz’s, would require a unanimous jury recommendation for death. The Legislature changed the law to comply.

The court’s new conservative majority repealed the unanimity requirement, effectively inviting the Legislature to allow non-unanimous death verdicts again. The Cruz verdict may encourage legislators to do that, but it would be wrong.

The Cruz jury found at least five aggravating factors in each of the 17 murders.

Mitigating factors

Florida law also requires jurors to decide if there are mitigating factors but does not require that they report what they found. In each of the 17 verdicts, one or more jurors did not agree that the aggravating factors outweighed the reasons to spare Cruz’s life.

To have condemned Cruz to death would not necessarily deter another mass murderer. They rarely survive a police response or kill themselves. Cruz, who was 19 when he legally bought his assault weapon in Coral Springs, is a rare exception.

The outcome is also noteworthy because the trial judge had refused to allow the defense to tell the jury of repeated failures by public and private agencies to give Cruz the treatment he needed or alert the public to his danger. The FBI ignored credible warnings that he would be a school shooter. So did an assistant principal at Stoneman Douglas.

Despite that restriction, some jurors apparently agreed with a former neighbor’s testimony that Cruz was never right mentally and suffered from fetal alcohol syndrome, which helped to expose the vast deficiencies in Florida’s mental health system.

Those wide gaps through which Cruz maliciously stepped are the ultimate lesson of this horrific tragedy.

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Miami Herald. October 13, 2022.

Editorial: Florida surgeon general’s COVID vaccine ‘study’ is politics dressed up as science

This far into the pandemic, tens of millions of Americans have received mRNA COVID vaccines, following vast medical trials. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration continue to review the safety of the vaccines, part of what the CDC calls “the most intense safety monitoring efforts in U.S. history.”

But somehow, Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo knows best. Armed only with a skimpy “analysis” done by the state Department of Health — an analysis that is not peer-reviewed, has no named authors and has been blasted by the medical community — he warned last week that men ages 18-39 shouldn’t get the Moderna or Pfizer COVID shots, citing a higher risk of heart-related deaths.

The analysis itself states it should be considered “preliminary” and “should be interpreted with caution.” And yet the stance that Ladapo took on Twitter was far from cautious, insisting that “FL will not be silent on the truth.” Twitter initially pulled down Ladapo’s post, but then restored it.

It’s true that COVID vaccines can cause heart inflammation in young men and boys, but that’s a rare occurrence, and symptoms are typically temporary and mild. Meanwhile, the protective effect of the vaccine is widely considered to outweigh the risks.

HANDPICKED DOCTOR

Ladapo, of course, is Gov. Ron DeSantis’ handpicked surgeon general, and the Harvard-trained doctor knows it. He seems intent on carrying out the governor’s increasingly anti-vax agenda. Ladapo has promoted Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine as legitimate treatments for COVID — they are not — and said in March that the state is against COVID vaccines for children. (The vaccines are considered safe and effective for children.) He vowed that Florida would “reject fear” when it comes to public health policy.

Reminder: More than 81,000 Floridians have died of COVID.

This latest report Ladapo is pushing has holes large enough to drive a car through. No amount of calling the resulting criticism an example of cancel culture — which is what a Florida DOH spokesman tried to do — will change that.

For one thing, it’s missing so many key details in the “methodology” section that Daniel Salmon, the director of the Institute for Vaccine Safety at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, said he can’t even figure out what the department actually did.

“If you were to submit that to any decent journal, it would be almost certainly rejected quickly,” Salmon said in the Miami Herald. “I think it’s irresponsible for a state government agency to put out something like that without sufficient detail.”

(We can’t ask the study’s authors because Ladapo refused to divulge them, calling that question a “fake” issue during a Washington Post interview.)

Salmon, who is leading a large global study looking into myocarditis — inflammation of the heart muscle — and the coronavirus vaccine, said the benefits of the vaccines still outweigh any risks. He was far from alone in criticizing Florida’s position.

Jason Salemi, a University of South Florida epidemiologist, told the Herald the study failed to focus on both risks and benefits, looking only at risk. “It’s not a complete picture,” Salemi said. “It’s taking one part of it and using that seemingly in isolation to make a recommendation.”

The Washington Post — because Ladapo’s claims have attracted national attention — spoke to more than a dozen experts on vaccines, patient safety and study design who had concerns with the Florida analysis. Concerns included a too-small sample size, using data from death certificates that are frequently inaccurate and skewed results because the study tried to exclude anyone who had COVID or died from it.

Particularly telling: Ladapo said in The Post interview that he hoped his mentors at Harvard University would support the methods used in the Florida study. The opposite happened. Health economist David Cutler said the Florida report was deeply flawed, he hoped it wouldn’t discourage people from getting vaccines and that Ladapo was wrong to base Florida’s vaccine policy on it.

He went further: “If I was a reviewer at a journal, I would recommend rejecting it,” Cutler told The Post.

Vaccine disinformation has real consequences — and Ladapo’s post has been shared hundreds of thousands of times. A revealing study by Yale University researchers published last month found higher COVID death rates for Republicans compared to Democrats, after vaccines were available.

And there is hesitancy — or at least malaise — when it comes to the most recent booster shot. The new bivalent COVID boosters are widely available, and yet only about half of Americans have heard much about the shot, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation poll. About a third of adults said they had gotten the booster or planned to.

COVID is still with us. There are vaccines that save lives. But people like Ladapo, with his privileged platform in Florida, can do real damage. His assertions amount to a political position disguised as science and cloaked in the state flag. The danger is that some people may forgo the life-saving vaccine because Florida, and Ladapo, told them to.

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Tampa Bay Times. October 14, 2022.

Editorial: From same-sex marriage to marijuana, we’ve agreed to agree

Americans have changed their minds on many big issues. What might be next?

As the midterm elections come ever closer, it can feel as if we’re stewing in a cauldron of tribalism, of our side vs. their side with no middle ground and little agreement on much of anything. That makes it a good time to take a breath and realize the consensus we’ve reached on some issues that were incredibly contentious not long ago. It gives us hope in the angry days ahead.

Same-sex marriage? Remember when Barack Obama said he opposed gay marriage in 2008 as he was running for president? He was in the mainstream then, but that view is firmly outside of it now. Fully 70% of Americans support same-sex marriage. A generation ago, when Gallup first asked the question, only 27% did. It was in 2011 — barely a decade ago — that Americans’ support first surpassed opposition to same-sex marriage. (Obama publicly changed his position the next year.) What was once illegal is now celebrated.

Marijuana? A vast majority of Americans are with the late reggae star Bob Marley when he sang, “Le-gal-ize it.” Two-thirds of Americans think marijuana should be legal, a record high (sorry), according to Gallup. That’s quite a reversal in just a generation. Twenty years ago, two-thirds were against legalizing it. Americans came to realize that the ridiculous old movie “Reefer Madness” was parody more than parable as it became a cult classic. Marijuana, we now agree, is not meth.

Abortion. There is even some agreement on still-divisive issues like abortion. Nearly six in 10 Americans didn’t want the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade, and 85% think abortion should be legal at least in some circumstances. Of course, there’s a huge real-world difference between banning abortions after six weeks or limiting them at the former Roe standard of fetal viability. But it’s worth remembering that amid all of the angry debate, only 13% support an outright ban. In other words, nearly nine in 10 Americans think some abortions should be legal. Even among Republicans, only a 58% majority supported overturning Roe. For context, that wouldn’t be a big-enough majority to pass a constitutional amendment in Florida.

Given what we’ve seen happen on formerly divisive issues such as marijuana and same-sex marriage, who knows where public opinion on abortion might land in less than a generation? We might be surprised at the bridge that can be built between those who believe in a woman’s right to choose and control her body and those who believe that life begins at conception.

This is not a Pollyannaish request to cut election deniers any slack or to let lies go uncorrected. It’s just a small tonic to imbibe as you fill out your mail-in ballot or prepare to vote in person, to keep in mind how different our views as Americans are from where they were even a few years ago — and how much we actually agree on. As the late poet Maya Angelou wrote in “Human Family,” “We are more alike, my friends, than we are unalike.”

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South Florida Sun Sentinel. October 18, 2022.

Editorial: Blame bad state law for UF fiasco, not Sasse

Florida’s secretive new university presidential search law is a colossal failure, and a greater insult to the public than expected.

First at Florida International University and now at the University of Florida, search committees identified only one finalist. They said no top candidates were willing to be publicly identified except as a lone finalist.

The law passed in this year’s legislative session (SB 520) provides for only disclosing a “final group of applicants” — plural — but that didn’t anticipate the deviousness of academia. Sen. Jeff Brandes, R-St. Petersburg, author of this gross erosion of government in the sunshine, insists he didn’t mean for only one finalist.

The gaming of the search law won’t be a lingering problem at FIU, where Kenneth Jessell was a senior vice president for 13 years before becoming interim president in January.

A pariah in Gainesville

But it casts an ominous shadow over Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse, the surprise anointed outsider at UF. Sasse starts out as a pariah in Gainesville with the enmity of many students and faculty, mostly for his conservative views. If Sasse is to have a successful presidency, as everyone should want, he will have to live down how he got the job.

The UF faculty was told belatedly that he and 11 others who were interviewed in secret refused to be identified publicly other than as the sole finalist. They exploited the new Florida law. Before its passage, all candidates’ names were released once they applied — as it should be.

The blanket of secrecy worked to Sasse’s advantage as the favorite of Gov. Ron DeSantis, whose chief of staff, James Uthmeier, helped usher him through the process.

The also-rans avoided having it known that they competed and lost — to their discredit. People too self-important to compete publicly for one of the best jobs in higher education in America have no business winning it. This was a total disservice to the universities and to the taxpayers to whom the universities belong.

Start all over again

Rather than accept an ultimatum, UF’s search committee should have rejected the entire lot and started over. That’s what UF trustees should do on Nov. 1, but they most likely won’t. As with most everything DeSantis wants, it’s a done deal.

Had the background intrigue been publicly known sooner, the protests over Sasse’s campus visit Oct. 10 might have been more strident.

Three days later, on Oct. 13, Amanda Phalin, the new chair of the UF Faculty Senate and a Sasse supporter, circulated a memorandum explaining what had happened.

“The Selection Committee did not choose to pick a sole finalist; a sole finalist was picked because none of the top candidates were willing to stay in the pool unless they were the sole finalist,” Phalin wrote. “In other words, none of the top candidates — all of whom were high-profile leaders — were willing to compete against two others publicly for 21 days, which is what the new state law requires.”

It’s beyond ironic that a U.S. senator who had been through two public statewide elections would be unwilling to compete publicly for a university presidency. Our two emails to his spokesman asking for Sasse’s side of it went unanswered.

In 2021, before the new law, Florida State University’s wide-open presidential search yielded a trove of strong applicants resulting in the choice of an acclaimed scientist and administrator, Richard McCullough, Harvard’s vice president for research. McCullough’s experience in securing research money made him an ideal fit for FSU.

Sasse’s pre-Senate experience as president of Midland College, a tiny, 1,700-student Lutheran school in Nebraska, doesn’t compare.

That doesn’t mean Sasse is unfit or that politicians can’t make good state university presidents. In Florida, John Thrasher and T. K. Wetherell at FSU, Betty Castor at the University of South Florida and Frank Brogan at Florida Atlantic University all earned the respect of students and faculty.

Why UF faculty are jittery

But the question about Sasse is why a politician was chosen for a university that is justifiably fearful for its future under a governor and legislature who meddle in the curriculum to make political points. A faculty survey this summer, with 623 responses, found 67% unsure of their freedom to dissent and 74% concerned over whether trustees would protect UF from “undue political influence.”

That reflects the UF administration’s attempts to bar professors from testifying in voting rights cases or even alluding to critical race theory, and the pressure from Tallahassee and UF’s own Board of Trustees chair — developer, Republican megadonor and DeSantis adviser Morteza “Mori” Hosseini — to secure a tenured faculty appointment for DeSantis’ anti-vaxxer surgeon general, Joseph Ladapo.

To Sasse’s credit, he was one of only seven Republican senators who had the integrity to vote to convict the impeached President Donald Trump of inciting the Jan. 6 insurrection. The question now is whether he can stand up to DeSantis. Given Sasse’s history of opposition to same-sex marriage and to the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the apprehension of students and faculty is warranted.

There has been considerable interest in an essay Sasse published in The Atlantic five months ago in which he took on some of the rigid traditions in higher education, such as the inflexible credit-hour standards for graduation and the exalted influence of the Ivy League. The essay has been faulted for being longer on criticism than on remedies, but the criticisms are pertinent. While we don’t agree with his blanket objections to President Joe Biden’s limited student loan forgiveness program, Sasse was spot-on in arguing that it is not an alternative to fundamental reforms.

Can a senator from the Great Plains protect Florida’s flagship university from the narrow goals and personal ambitions of DeSantis and other Florida politicians? Having had no effective choice in the matter, the university and the state can only wait, watch and hope.

END

News from © The Associated Press, 2022