In his opinion piece in the Orlando Sentinel, “The twisted ‘justice’ of Tommy Zeigler’s half-century on death row,” Scott Maxwell writes about the case of Tommy Zeigler, who has been on Florida’s death row since 1976, “as proof of how perilously flawed death penalty cases can be.” It is a too-familiar story of the utter cruelty and blind vengeance that characterizes the death penalty system in the U.S. The 79-year-old Zeigler wasn’t even sentenced to death by a jury but by the judge who overruled it “and ordered his execution,” Maxwell writes. Zeigler, who has always maintained his innocence of the quadruple murder that sent him to death row in 1976, has “had to wait for half a century” to finally get the DNA tests that he and his lawyers say will prove that.
Even though it’s been almost 30 years since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Ford v. Wainwright (1986) that sentencing a person determined to be “insane” violates the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment, “competency for execution (CFE) remains underexplored in the psychological, psychiatric, and legal literature,” three Cornell University professors argue in their paper, “Analyzing the Successful Incompetent to Be Executed Cases in the United States: A First Pass.” In their ” first-of-its-kind descriptive study,” I-An Su, John H. Blume, and Stephen J. Ceci analyzed the cases of 28 claimants who successfully proved they were incompetent to be executed because of their mental health challenges, compared to the “general death row population and homicide cases nationwide.” Some of the more surprising findings include the fact that all of the successful claimants are male, “relatively older,” and are “underrepresented among White and Latinx inmates.”
In her documentary, “The Window on Death Row,” filmmaker Linda Freund profiles Joaquín José Martínez, a Spanish-American who was wrongly convicted of a double murder and sentenced to death when he was 24. After five years in prison, three on death row, Martínez was exonerated, the first European to be exonerated from a U.S. death row. The film focuses on Martínez’s life on the row and his relationship with death row chaplain Dale Recinella.
