Whatever Americans think of the death penalty, they don’t want it imposed on prisoners who are intellectually disabled, polls consistently show.
Former Florida Gov. Lawton Chiles thought the same way, and considered commuting the death sentence of Daniel Doyle, who was sentenced to death for raping and killing his cousin, Pamela Kipp, in Miramar in 1981.
Doyle’s guilt was not in doubt. He also pleaded guilty to murdering 13-year-old Monica Ruddick.
His mental disability was so obvious that four of 12 jurors voted to spare his life. He never advanced beyond third grade. After eight years in special education, he could spell “cat,” but little more. His IQ was 58. A former neighbor said she had “never met a person in the world more mentally incompetent.”
Years pass with no action
But a governor needed agreement from the elected Cabinet to commute anyone’s sentence. There were not enough votes for Doyle, so they postponed his clemency petition until 2020, leaving him on death row for at least 25 more years — his fate uncertain.
As the years passed, the Florida Legislature forbade executions of the mentally handicapped, but with conditions that made it difficult to qualify.
The U.S. Supreme Court imposed a nationwide ban on executing the mentally handicapped, but left implementation to the states. The court then overturned a part of the Florida law that arbitrarily excluded anyone with an IQ higher than 70, but the Florida Supreme Court, having accepted that ruling for older cases like Doyle’s, reversed itself after three liberal justices retired.
Gov. Ron DeSantis’ new conservative majority rationalized that the nation’s highest court had not made a change of “fundamental significance” but simply “more precisely defined the procedure.”
It’s hard to devise a more cynical excuse for state-sanctioned killing.
“The result,” wrote dissenting Justice Jorge Labarga, “is an increased risk that certain individuals may be executed even if they are intellectually disabled.”
The 25 years passed, and three more, with no action on Doyle’s plea to the governor and Cabinet. They haven’t commuted a death sentence since 1983.
But Doyle is off death row after all.
It happened quietly, with no announcement in March 2023 in a postconviction appeal that had been pending since 2020 before Broward Circuit Judge Edward Merrigan Jr.
Mark Olive, Doyle’s attorney, and Assistant State Attorney Carolyn McCann worked out a plea.
Doyle, 64, would be resentenced to life if he waived future appeals, withdrew his clemency petition, and agreed to terms effectively preventing any future parole. Among other things, it meant giving up credit for the 41.5 years he had already served in prison.
With the judge’s approval, Doyle was resentenced to life and left death row for a state prison near Pensacola where he’s classified as “close custody.”
Unknown to the public — until now
Broward State Attorney Harold Pryor notified the Florida Commission on Offender Review that Doyle had waived his right to ever apply for parole, for which he would not be eligible until age 83.
Neither side ever announced the humane resolution to this widely reported, emotionally fraught legal saga. The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board learned of it this week while reviewing the prison’s death row roster.
Olive, a leading death row legal expert, was reluctant to discuss it. Pryor’s office replied to questions by email.
“After a thorough review of all of the medical (and) mental evaluations regarding Doyle, the legal arguments, case law and discussions with the victim’s next of kin, prosecutors believed the defense had a very strong argument on this issue,” wrote Paula McMahon, Pryor’s spokeswoman.
She said the victim’s father attended the hearing by Zoom and told the judge “he believed it was the right outcome.”
She said Pryor and former State Attorney Michael Satz, who had prosecuted Doyle 43 years ago, approved and that the attorney general’s office was informed.
This was the right outcome. It would disgrace Florida and disparage humanity to execute a man with the mind of a child, no matter what he had done. He remains in prison for the safety of the public.
Florida, still an outlier
Florida and the U.S. are outliers among the world’s advanced societies. All western nations have forsaken the death penalty. Russia, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, China and Iran are among the disagreeable company we keep in that respect.
The U.S. government and 27 states still have it on the books. To execute mentally or intellectually disabled people is barbaric.
In its 2002 decision Atkins v. Virginia, holding execution of the mentally disabled to be unconstitutionally “cruel and unusual,” the U.S. Supreme Court explained why.
“With respect to retribution — the interest in seeing that the offender gets his ‘just deserts’ — the severity of the appropriate punishment necessarily depends on the culpability of the offender,” Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for the majority. “The lesser culpability of the mentally retarded offender surely does not merit that form of retribution.”
Stevens noted that such defendants are less likely to be aware that they might face execution, less able to assist in their own defense, make poor witnesses, are more prone to confessing falsely and less likely “to make a persuasive showing of mitigation in the face of prosecutorial evidence of one or more aggravating factors.”
The vote was 6-3. Clarence Thomas is the last of those justices still serving. He dissented.
Despite the Atkins decision and Florida’s own law on the issue, death row prisoners claiming to be mentally disabled still face an obstacle of legalisms contrived to favor the executioner. Too little has changed since Lawton Chiles tried to spare Doyle’s life 30 years ago.
The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Opinion Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Opinion Editor Dan Sweeney, editorial writers Pat Beall and Martin Dyckman and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson. Editorials are the opinion of the Board and written by one of its members or a designee. To contact us, email at letters@sun-sentinel.com.
