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Execution delayed amidst questions about death penalty

By STEVE BOUSQUET and ALEX LEARY
Published July 23, 2007

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TALLAHASSEE -- Less than a week after Gov. Charlie Crist lifted a moratorium on executions, a judge delayed the execution process for a Death Row inmate, raising new questions about the future of Florida's death penalty.

Circuit Judge Carven Angel in Ocala questioned the "experience and competence" of the state-employed hooded executioner who's paid to apply lethal chemicals in the death chamber.

"It's going to hold up everything," said Neal Dupree, one of the attorneys for condemned killer Ian Deco Lightbourne, who initiated the challenge.

Angel's preliminary ruling Sunday came less than a week after Crist signed another inmate's death warrant, ending a seven-month moratorium on executions in Florida.

The execution of child murderer Mark Dean Schwab is set for Nov. 15. But Schwab's attorney is expected to raise the same legal issues at a court hearing Wednesday in Titusville.

The judge's action applies to a single case -- that of Lightbourne, whose attorneys have challenged the state's method of execution as a form of cruel and unusual punishment prohibited by the U.S. Constitution.

The attorneys acted following last year's execution of Angel Diaz, whose death took 34 minutes, twice as long as is normal.

No executions have been held since then, and no death warrant has been issued in the Lightbourne case.

The judge focused largely on the qualifications of the prison system's anonymous hooded executioner, who is paid $150 per execution and whose identity is confidential by state law.

"I don't think that any 18-year-old executioner with the pressure of a governor's warrant behind him to carry out an execution, and with the pressure of the whole world, the press and the whole world in front of him, and looking at him, is going to have enough experience and competence to stop an execution when it needs to be stopped," the judge said, according to a transcript of Sunday's proceedings. "I just don't think that's going to happen."

The judge suggested a system for allowing "public input" in reviewing the procedures for future executions in Florida.

In his statement from the bench, the judge directed some of his comments at Crist. Said the judge: "He needs to know that the process is going to be consistent with evolving standards and notions of the dignity of man ... Well, how can the governor know that... when he's considering whether or not he ought to sign a warrant?"

Lightbourne, 48, is on Death Row for the 1981 murder of Nancy O'Farrell of Marion County.

Angel, 64, has been a circuit judge since 1975.

 

[Last modified July 23, 2007, 19:04:12]