Opinion ID: 1704745
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 6

Heading: CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT ARTICLE 1, SECTION 17 (Legislative)

Text: BALLOT TITLE: PRESERVATION OF THE DEATH PENALTY; UNITED STATES SUPREME COURT INTERPRETATION OF CRUEL AND UNUSUAL PUNISHMENT BALLOT SUMMARY: Proposing an amendment to Section 17 of Article I of the State Constitution preserving the death penalty, and permitting any execution method unless prohibited by the Federal Constitution. Requires construction of the prohibition against cruel and/or unusual punishment to conform to United States Supreme Court interpretation of the Eighth Amendment. Prohibits reduction of a death sentence based on invalidity of execution method, and provides for continued force of sentence. Provides for retroactive applicability. Supervisor of Elections, Leon County, Fla., Official Sample Ballot, 1998 General Election 4 (Nov. 3, 1998). This ballot title and summary are deficient under article XI, section 5, for several reasons.
The ballot title and summary are misleading because the latter portion of the title (UNITED STATES SUPREME COURT INTERPRETATION OF CRUEL AND UNUSUAL PUNISHMENT) and the second sentence in the summary (Requires construction of the prohibition against cruel and/or unusual punishment to conform to United States Supreme Court interpretation of the Eighth Amendment.) imply that the amendment will promote the rights of Florida citizens through the rulings of the United States Supreme Court. Florida's Cruel or Unusual Punishment Clause was adopted in 1838 by the Founding Fathers at the first constitutional convention in Port St. Joe and provided as follows: That the great and essential principles of liberty and free government, may be recognized and established, we declare: . . . . 12. That excessive bail shall in no case be required; nor shall excessive fines be imposed; nor shall cruel or unusual punishments be inflicted. Art. 1, § 12, Fla. Const. of 1838 (emphasis added). The Clause has remained an integral part of our state constitution ever since and today provides: Excessive punishments.Excessive fines, cruel or unusual punishment, attainder, forfeiture of estate, indefinite imprisonment, and unreasonable detention of witnesses are forbidden. Art. 1, § 17, Fla. Const. Use of the word or instead of and in the Clause indicates that the framers intended that both alternatives (i.e., cruel and unusual) were to be embraced individually and disjunctively within the Clause's proscription. [26] This Court in Traylor v. State, 596 So.2d 957 (Fla.1992), explained that our system of constitutional government in Florida is grounded on a principle of robust individualism and that our state constitutional rights thus provide greater freedom from government intrusion into the lives of citizens than do their federal counterparts: Federal and state bills of rights thus serve distinct but complementary purposes. The federal Bill of Rights facilitates political and philosophical homogeneity among the basically heterogeneous states by securing, as a uniform minimum, the highest common denominator of freedom that can prudently be administered throughout all fifty states. The state bills of rights, on the other hand, express the ultimate breadth of the common yearnings for freedom of each insular state population within our nation. Id. at 962. In short: [T]he federal Constitution... represents the floor for basic freedoms; the state constitution, the ceiling. Id. In the present case, by changing the wording of the Cruel or Unusual Punishment Clause to become Cruel and Unusual and by requiring that our state Clause be interpreted in conformity with its federal counterpart, the proposed amendment effectively strikes the state Clause from the constitutional scheme. Under such a scenario, the organic law governing either cruel or unusual punishments in Florida would consist of a floor (i.e., the federal constitution) and nothing more. The Court in Traylor addressed precisely this scenario: Under the federalist principles expressed above, where a proposed constitutional revision results in the loss or restriction of an independent fundamental state right, the loss must be made known to each participating voter at the time of the general election. Cf. People Against Tax Revenue Mismanagement v. County of Leon, 583 So.2d 1373, 1376 (Fla.1991) ( This is especially true if the ballot language gives the appearance of creating new rights or protections, when the actual effect is to reduce or eliminate rights or protections already in existence.). Traylor at 962-63 n. 5 (emphasis added). In the present case, a citizen could well have voted in favor of the proposed amendment thinking that he or she was protecting state constitutional rights when in fact the citizen was doing the exact opposite -i.e., he or she was voting to nullify those rights. [27]
To conform to section 101.161(1), a ballot summary must state the chief purpose of the proposed amendment. [28] In evaluating an amendment's chief purpose, a court must look not to subjective criteria espoused by the amendment's sponsor but to objective criteria inherent in the amendment itself, such as the amendment's main effect. [29] In the present case, as explained above, the main effect of the amendment is simple, clear-cut, and beyond dispute: The amendment will nullify the Cruel or Unusual Punishment Clause. This effect far outstrips the stated purpose (i.e., to preserve the death penalty), for the amendment will nullify a longstanding constitutional provision that applies to all criminal punishments, not just the death penalty. Nowhere in the summary, however, is this effect mentioned-or even hinted at. The main effect of the amendment is not stated anywhere on the ballot. (The voter is not even told on the ballot that the word or in the Cruel or Unusual Punishment Clause will be changed to and [30] a significant change by itself.)