A.G. Gancarski
More national publicity for the Jacksonville area and State Attorney Angela Corey materialized this week, courtesy of the Harvard Law School.
Its Fair Punishment Project, which “highlight[s] the gross injustices resulting from prosecutorial misconduct,” lists America’s “deadliest prosecutors.”
And Corey’s top prosecutor, Bernie de la Rionda, is listed as one of “three to watch” on the study’s list of prosecutors, part of “a snapshot of three active prosecutors who, if they continue on their current trajectories, may soon join the ranks of the deadliest prosecutors in America. Taken together, the profiles featured in this report demonstrate that the death penalty has been, and continues to be, a personality-driven system with very few safeguards against misconduct and frequent abuse of power, a fact that seriously undermines its legitimacy.”
Their take on de la Rionda will be familiar to those who have read coverage of him in the Florida Times-Union.
“Bernie de la Rionda of Duval County, Florida, has put more people on death row than just about any other prosecutor in Florida.
“It has been reported that he obtained death sentences in 22 cases,” the report said, adding that “frustrated by delays in executions, de la Rionda stated that we should ‘bring firing squads back, as bullets are pretty cheap, and they’re very quick.’”
“The Florida Supreme Court has reversed de la Rionda in two cases after deeming death a disproportionately severe punishment for those particular defendants,” claims the report.
De la Rionda, the report continues, “has the dubious distinction of obtaining death sentences against a number of defendants with significant impairments, including: a drug-addicted man who was severely abused and neglected as a child and suffers from significant neurological impairments; a man with a 76 IQ and ‘mild to moderate impairment of his frontal lobe function’; and a severely depressed man with suicidal ideations whom the judge found to be ‘under the influence of extreme mental or emotional duress.’”
Notable: the Duval County court administration budget, it was revealed Wednesday in a budget hearing, has an unresolved backlog of 800 cases in which inmates claim, among other things, that they are being “held illegally.”
Some of those are death penalty cases.
The court administration seeks to hire contract lawyers to handle this backlog, which apparently is unique to Jacksonville; has gotten the notice of higher courts on the state and federal level; and which, quite arguably, is a hidden cost of aggressive prosecution.
Currently, de la Rionda’s boss is polling in second place in her re-election bid. Despite the poll being of only Republicans in a closed primary, 61 percent of Republicans in the 4th Circuit polled want her removed from office.
