Esecuzione di un disabile programmata per oggi alle 6 pm locali.

La Florida ignora la Corte Suprema

5 agosto 2013.  L'editoriale del New York Times di ieri segnala la terribile decisione da parte dello Stato della Florida di procedere ugualmente con l'esecuzione di John Ferguson, disabile mentale e nostro caro amico.  John, che ora ha 64 anni, si trova nel braccio della morte da 34 anni. 

La Costituzione proibisce l'esecuzione dei malati mentali. Con la Comunita' di Sant'Egidio preghiamo per John, non perdiamo la speranza che lui sia salvato, imploriamo clemenza per la sua vita.

John preghiamo per te! Vogliamo essere oggi la tua famiglia, il tuo nome e' nel nostro cuore. Caro John preghiamo il Signore di consolare il tuo cuore. Non sei solo, noi tutti continuiamo a sperare.  Ti vogliamo bene. 

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August 4, 2013

Florida Ignores the Supreme Court

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

Once again, a state is attempting to put to death a man who is clearly ineligible for execution under the Constitution. Once again, state and federal courts are ignoring uncontested facts by hiding behind the draperies of legal procedure. And once again we are forced to wonder why the Supreme Court is so reluctant to step in when a man’s life is at stake.
John Errol Ferguson is scheduled to die at 6 p.m. Monday in Florida. Mr. Ferguson, who brutally murdered eight people in 1977 and 1978, has sat on Florida’s death row for 34 years. Doctors long ago gave him a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. He believes, among other things, that he is the “Prince of God” and that he is being executed because he “can control the sun.”
The Florida Supreme Court found that he was competent to die, but only by applying a test for mental illness that the Supreme Court has explicitly rejected. A federal appeals court upheld the sentence, relying largely on a federal law that requires a significant degree of deference to state court rulings. Apparently it wasn’t even enough that one of the federal court’s judges found the test Florida applied to be “patently incorrect.”
The case is reminiscent of Georgia’s attempts to execute Warren Lee Hill Jr., who is intellectually disabled, in direct contravention of the Supreme Court’s bar on executing the intellectually disabled. At least in Mr. Ferguson’s case, the lower courts have a legitimate complaint: the Supreme Court’s attempts to define mental illness have generated more confusion than clarity. But even where standards are clear, some states seem untroubled by carrying out a death sentence that violates the Constitution.
Both Mr. Ferguson’s and Mr. Hill’s crimes were unquestionably horrific; the crimes of death-row inmates almost always are. But to focus on the crime obscures the central moral dilemma of capital punishment. As Sister Helen Prejean, the death-penalty opponent, has put it, the question is not whether someone deserves to die but whether we deserve to kill him. If a state chooses to take that profound action, it should at the very least adhere to the Constitution. If it doesn’t, the Supreme Court must act.