Trayvon Case Not Exactly Top Priority for Florida's GOP Governor

[PoliticalTiger]

Last Monday, Rick Scott—Florida's beleaguered freshman tea party governor—made a powerful executive decision: He signed legislation to require drug tests of state employees. On Friday, he acted decisively and signed a controversial pro-school-prayer bill into law. His top cop, Republican teabagger Attorney General Pam Bondi, spent the week on one of her top priorities: promoting the state's Supreme Court case against President Obama's health care reforms. The state's Republican Party this week also began airing a new pro-Scott ad, two years ahead of his next election, and Scott's also taken to bragging about his recent legislative accomplishments.

Somewhere in there, the governor addressed Trayvon Martin's killing.

As the public furor grows over Martin's shooting and the fate of his killer, Scott—one of the nation's least popular governors, and host of the Republican presidential convention this summer—seems to be struggling with how to respond to the case. It's not that he's done nothing. Last Monday, about the same time the Justice Department expressed its interest in Trayvon's case, he sent a one-paragraph letter to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (the state's FBI) directing the agency to investigate. He met with a group of protesters on Tuesday—though he didn't accede to their wishes to set up a task force on racial profiling.

In Scott's most substantive moves, he appointed a new special prosecutor to the case after meeting with Martin's family, and he's agreed to set up a task force that will investigate the state's expansive "stand your ground" self-defense law. But Scott's chosen prosecutor has been attacked by a respected law school dean as having "no enthusiasm for defending citizens," and the task force will be led by his lieutenant governor, with its members picked by Bondi and four top state legislators—all of them pro-gun Republicans. Scott signaled that the task force would tread carefully on Second Amendment ground, saying in a statement that it would "investigate how to make sure a tragedy such as this does not occur in the future, while at the same time, protecting the fundamental rights of all of our citizens—especially the right to feel protected and safe in our state."

http://motherjones.com/politics/2012/03/...n-response

[suzie]

The part about Scott's chosen prosecutor is sort of silly and misleading. As I understand it, the woman chosen is a career prosecutor who has dealt with a lot of homicides. The quote from the law school professor seems to reference the Public Defender in Jacksonville, where she is State Attorney.

I would think we'd want a tough minded prosecutor to sort through this case. Angela Corey is an elected official herself--is she likely to violate her oath of office for Rick Scott?

This case is not going to make Rick Scott's llfe easier. But I'm thinking of another lady from Florida, a tough-minded former State Attorney who didn't always act in ways that her new boss would have liked.

[PoliticalTiger]

(03-24-2012 10:29 PM)suzie Wrote:  The part about Scott's chosen prosecutor is sort of silly and misleading. As I understand it, the woman chosen is a career prosecutor who has dealt with a lot of homicides. The quote from the law school professor seems to reference the Public Defender in Jacksonville, where she is State Attorney.

I would think we'd want a tough minded prosecutor to sort through this case. Angela Corey is an elected official herself--is she likely to violate her oath of office for Rick Scott?

This case is not going to make Rick Scott's llfe easier. But I'm thinking of another lady from Florida, a tough-minded former State Attorney who didn't always act in ways that her new boss would have liked.

I think the questions a lot of people have about Angela Corey is she is as far right as Scott. She has a history of targeting young black males and trying them as adults. Just recently she made news by charging a 12 year old boy who is accused of killing his 2 year old brother as an adult, which means if he is convicted he could spend the rest of his life in jail. In Florida, a life sentence is just that, life. No parole, no early release.

After she ran for the office of State Attorney and won, she sent sent 230 juvenile cases to adult court. And she fired 10 assistant state attorneys, over half of the investigators, and 48 support employees.

Hopefully with the national spotlight on this case, she'll do the right thing, but I'm skeptical because I don't trust anything Rick Scott does.

[jaxx]

Hopefully the DOJ looking over her shoulder will keep Corey on task. Her track record looks like crap.

[suzie]

I'm skeptical about Rick Scott, too, and Corey may be an absolutely terrible choice to deal with this case. But the Mother Jones article is so full of stuff that seems like typical "she's on the Right, I'm on the Left" reactions--I don't know that they help advance our cause.

She fired 10 ADAs and support staff. So what? They supported her opponent and expected to get fired--that's the prerogative of the winner in an election for State Attorney. It's an elected office. Bill Clinton fired all the U.S. Attorneys when he came into office. That too was expected.

In the case of the Fernandez kid, Corey's office made an offer which his attorneys refused. The offer was that the kid would plead to 2nd degree murder and spend up to age 21 in a juvenile facility. His lawyers didn't want him to be incarcerated in juvie past age 18 and didn't want him to plead to "murder". Since Fernandez broke the 2 year old's leg some time before beating him to death later and since charges had already been prepared for Fernandez for sexually abusing a 5 year old half-brother prior to the beating death, staying in a State juvenile corrections facility until age 21 doesn't seem terrible to me.

Yes, Corey may have turned over an excessive amount of kids for adult prosecution, but how does that relate to this case? To get turned over, you have to commit a crime that most of the citizens believe is pretty awful, like murder, armed robbery, sexual assault, carjacking. According to everything I've read, Trayvon Martin was not a kid who had any record, much less one for a horrific crime. He was a victim of violence.

The real concern is that Corey owes her support to the NRA types that wanted the "justified homicide" law in the first place. But all kinds of politicians, like Jeb Bush, have already come forward to point out that this case doesn't fall under that law. In their minds, it means you don't have to retreat---but not "follow someone around and provoke a reason to shoot them."

It could turn out that Angela Corey has to prosecute Zimmerman to protect the NRA and friends' interest in keeping this law.