Florida Today carries the AP report, "Inmate on death row since 1980 set to die." It's by Mitch Stacy.
A twice-convicted murderer who has lived on Florida’s death row for more than three decades is scheduled to die by lethal injection this week for killing a St. Petersburg mother — but like many executions, why he is being killed now and why it didn’t happen years ago are both something of a mystery.
If 65-year-old Robert Brian Waterhouse is executed Wednesday at Florida State Prison near Starke, he will have lingered on death row longer than any of the previous 276 people executed by the state, according to the Department of Corrections. He’s spent more than 31 years mostly by himself in a 6-by-9-foot cell as his various appeals worked their way through the courts.
Just 18 of the 395 people currently on death row have been there longer than Waterhouse, who was sentenced in September 1980 for raping and killing 29-year-old Deborah Kammerer.
No one in Gov. Rick Scott’s office would talk in detail about the process that led him to pick Waterhouse over others whose appeals have run their course. It’s the third death warrant Scott has signed since taking office in January 2011.
And:
The attorney general’s office is charged with keeping track of the status of cases, and generally responds to requests from the governor regarding individual inmates who’ve been through their major appeals and the clemency process, and would likely be unsuccessful with any appeals filed after the death warrant is signed. Typically, they’re inmates who haven’t initiated any new litigation in years.
Craig Trocino, who handled death row appeals for years before going to work for a University of Miami law school clinic, said the “incredibly secretive” nature of the governor’s selection process has always disturbed death penalty opponents.
“There was no logic to any it, as far as we could tell, and nobody was speaking about it,” Trocino said.
“If it’s really above-board, the governor would open his book and say, ‘This is the procedure I take in determining this.’”
Last year, Florida executed Manual Valle after more than 33 years on death row. Supreme Court Justice Breyer's dissent to a rejected stay motion discussed the lengthy incarceration of death sentenced inmates.
Comments