Vindictive Florida Speaker of the House

If there was ever any question that the Florida Legislature were acting like spoiled children this is it.  The problem is that these spoiled children have immense power and could care less about the damage they are causing to the Florida citizens, our laws and the separation of powers.

Dean Cannon needs to go!

Written by


Paul Flemming


Special to news-press.com
9:35 PM, May. 5, 2011

How much is life-and-death information worth? We have an answer: $370,000.

That, apparently, is too much.

The Florida Commission on Capital Cases was eliminated Thursday in an unexpected, undiscussed, unfathomable conference of legislators.

The House put into a budget conforming bill - late in the session, without any previous hearings, at an Appropriations Committee meeting - repeal of the state law that created the commission.

Among its duties, the commission maintains detailed case-status information on people condemned to die. Web pages providing that information have had 800,000 visitors. Now it won't exist.

It provides unique Continuing Legal Education courses for capital-defense attorneys.

The commission provides the governor's office with information on death row inmates who have exhausted their appeals and are eligible for death warrants.

The elimination of a single $370,000 appropriation is miniscule in a $70 billion budget that will get rid of more than 4,500 state positions and cut plenty of important spending.

So, the death of the commission and its five staffers is a common enough story.

But it gets nuttier.

Speaker Dean Cannon isn't going to get the full measure of his top priority for this legislative session, the dismantling of the Florida Supreme Court and building it back up in his own imagination.

He wanted to increase the number of justices to 10 and split the court in two, one division for criminal cases, another for civil litigation.

The speaker's idea would have swept clean the judge and justice selection process while centralizing the power for choosing jurists with the governor.

The House passed its speaker's grand plan. The Senate balked.

The expand-and-split scheme is gone. Judicial Nominating Commissions will be swept clean, replaced by members of Gov. Rick Scott's choosing. The Senate will confirm nominations.

Cannon's proposal seemed built on either redressing a past political grudge (the Supremes throwing off the 2010 ballot three legislatively sponsored amendments) or putting in the fix on a prospective political agenda (court review of next year's redistricting plans). Cannon denied both, but his alternative justifications are either demonstrably false or suspect to the point of silliness.

Cannon said he wanted more executions carried out more quickly and that his plan would help. Sen. Ronda Storms, a Valrico Republican who also is a board member for the Commission on Capital Cases, gave the lie to that claim during debate.

She said, as recounted here and elsewhere with information provided by the commission, that the governor had a list of 47 condemned prisoners ready for his signature to execute them.

The holdup to Florida's death machine isn't the state's Supreme Court.

Cannon has another year as speaker. He pulled a familiar gambit. His budget includes $400,000 for a study of the Supreme Court's workload among seven specific areas of inquiry about court efficiency.
State Courts Administrator Lisa Goodner - her office puts together all kinds of studies on the efficiency of the state's court system, exhaustively detailed - said she'll happily cooperate with the study, as she has in many Office of Program Policy Analysis and Government Accountability audits and studies.

"We think the facts that are out there are good facts for the courts," Goodner said. "Those numbers speak for themselves."

With declining funding and rising caseloads, Florida courts, the Supreme Court included maintain admirable clearance statistics.

Cannon and the Florida Legislature seem to doubt it.
"The party conducting the study shall evaluate the data, make selected audits of such data as necessary, and report to the Legislature regarding the accuracy of such data," the budget says.

These studies are not new. Neither are their intentions novel. It's backward engineering the case for a desired policy outcome.
Last year, just at this time, after two sessions where the Legislature failed to act on a Cannon-championed idea to open Florida waters to oil and natural-gas drilling, a study was delivered.
The House, at Cannon's urging, paid $200,000 for this report.
It concluded - while BP's Deepwater Horizon well was gushing in the Gulf - that spills would be small, infrequent and easy to fix.

PATIENT ADVOCATES WIN! SENATE REMOVES KEY PROVISIONS FROM MED MAL BILL

By JIM SAUNDERS
THE NEWS SERVICE OF FLORIDA

THE CAPITAL, TALLAHASSEE, May 2, 2011….. The Florida Senate on Monday blew holes in a medical-malpractice bill backed by doctors and hospitals, as the House overwhelmingly approved the proposal across the Capitol.

Senators eliminated key parts of the bill, including one that would shield hospitals from liability if contracted physicians commit malpractice. Hospitals often contract with outside groups of physicians, such as radiologists, to provide care.

Critics said that part of the bill could hurt patients who go to hospitals and have little choice in their physicians. If a hospital is not liable --- and a doctor lacks malpractice insurance --- the patient might not be adequately compensated if malpractice occurs, they argued.

“It (deleting that part of the bill) provides recourse to patients who are injured in hospitals by physicians they don’t even know,’’ said Sen. Miguel Diaz de la Portilla, a Miami Republican who sponsored an amendment to remove the provision.

But bill sponsor Alan Hays, R-Umatilla, defended the proposal --- and rejected charges that legal immunity would give hospitals leeway to contract with cheaper, less-qualified physicians.

“The hospitals are there to provide quality medical care to the patients,’’ Hays said.

The Senate’s approval of three amendments was a victory for personal-injury lawyers, who have lobbied against the bill (SB 1590). The stripped-down bill continues to include new certification requirements for out-of-state expert witnesses who testify against doctors in malpractice cases.

Supporters argue those requirements would allow Florida to discipline experts who offer deceptive or fraudulent testimony --- a longtime complaint of doctors.

The Senate debate came at the same time the House voted 88-28 to approve its version of the bill (HB 479), which still has the proposals backed by doctors and hospitals. With the legislative session scheduled to end Friday, it is not clear how the chambers will reconcile the bills.

Rep. Bill Hager, R-Boca Raton, said legal reforms are needed because Florida continues to have a doctor shortage in some specialties.

“Let’s stand with our physicians, let’s stand with our hospitals,’’ Hager said.

But Rep. Richard Steinberg, D-Miami Beach, pointed to 2003 legislation that made it harder to sue for malpractice. He said lawmakers received promises that the measure would lower malpractice insurance rates, but doctors are still complaining about rates and seeking more limits on lawsuits.

“The issue is not that the patients have too many rights, the problem is there is not sufficient competition in the malpractice-insurance industry,’’ Steinberg said.

The House also voted 77-41 on Monday to approve a bill (HB 661) that would help shield nursing homes from lawsuits. Among other things, the bill would place a $300,000 cap on non-economic damages in wrongful-death lawsuits and make it harder to sue nursing homes for punitive damages.

But the fate of the nursing-home bill also is unclear, because a Senate version stalled in a committee.

Groups such as the Florida Medical Association and the Florida Hospital Association have lobbied for the medical-malpractice bill.

Along with the eliminating the proposed malpractice shield for hospitals, the Senate on Monday also deleted part of the bill that dealt with gathering patient information in malpractice cases.

The proposal called for allowing for what are known as “ex parte” communications between defense attorneys and physicians who treat patients after alleged malpractice. The talks could occur without the patients’ lawyers taking part.

But Sen. Anitere Flores, a Miami Republican who sponsored an amendment to eliminate the proposal, said defense attorneys should not be able to interview treating physicians without the patients’ lawyers being present.
“I don’t think it’s right for my medical history to be divulged without my knowledge,’’ Flores said.
But Hays said he was trying to fix a “grossly un-level playing field” that allows patients’ attorneys to have access to information from treating physicians.
Senators also eliminated part of the bill that called for making it harder to sue doctors over their failure to order supplemental diagnostic tests for patients.
Doctors argue that fear of lawsuits causes them to order unnecessary tests and perform “defensive medicine.” They say that drives up medical costs.
The bill proposed requiring patients to show by “clear and convincing evidence” that a doctor’s failure to order additional tests violated standards of care. That would make such cases harder to prove.
But the proposal’s critics said the state doesn’t need such a requirement.
“There’s no need to change the burden of proof,’’ said Sen. Rene Garcia, a Hialeah Republican who backed eliminating that part of the bill.

The Court Packing Plan is Dead!

This evening the Senate took up and passed an amendment to HJR 7111 that gutted House Speaker Dean Cannon’s legislative assault on our fair and impartial courts. The amendment, co-sponsored by ten Republican Senators, eliminated the proposal to split the Supreme Court into two divisions and give the Governor full reign to select justices. It also did away with the proposal to set court funding at 2.25% of General Revenue, a move that would have potentially locked the judicial branch into perpetual underfunding.

Please take time to contact the lawmakers who sponsored this amendment, and stood strong against extreme pressure from leadership to go along with Cannon’s court “reform” package. To see the list of sponsors and read the amendment, go to http://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2011/7111/Amendment/289464/HTML

The House has reportedly agreed to the amended proposal. That vote will come later this week. The measures that remain in the bill include Senate confirmation of appellate court judicial appointments and a lowering of the threshold for the legislature to over-rule a court rule of procedure (to 50% instead of 2/3’s, with a requirement for the legislature to provide policy direction for any rule they overturn). The amended joint resolution would also give the Speaker of the House access to JQC investigative files for potential impeachment proceedings. If passed by the House, the proposal will go on the ballot in the 2012 general election.

While no bill would have been our first choice – this is a major victory. We will continue to watch the JNC bill which is still sitting on the special order calendar, although all indications are it will not move forward.

Links to lawmaker contact information are available on our website, http://www.fairandimpartial.com/

Thank goodness for the hard work of all the advocates for justice that worked tirelessly to defeat this bad bill.  Hopefully this will show the legislature of Florida, along with the Governer, that they cannot run rough shod over the rights of Florida citizens.  The separation of powers is at risk in Florida, and the attorneys at Cohen & Kuvin are working hard to protect your rights against this unlawful intrusion by the legislative and executive branch.

Spencer T. Kuvin
Cohen Kuvin
skuvin@cohenkuvin.com