Duane Owen Execution

A man convicted of killing and sexually assaulting a teenage girl and another woman in separate South Florida attacks in 1984 is set to be executed next month under a death warrant signed Tuesday by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis.

According to court records, Owen broke into a Delray Beach home in March 1984 and attacked 14-year-old Karen Slattery, who was babysitting two young children. Owen repeatedly stabbed the girl and then sexually assaulted her, investigators said. The young children weren’t injured.

About two months later, Georgianna Worden, 38, was sleeping in her Boca Raton home when Owen broke in and fatally struck her in the head with a hammer multiple times before raping her, officials said.

Duane Owen committed two horrible murders. They were separate acts with aggravating circumstances. Some of these death penalty cases are like this.  Some are not.  Some are more "worse of the worst" though with so few executions, they are arbitrarily selected.   

A basic problem, if one that no justice on the Court now has agreed is a problem on its own (cf: Stevens and Breyer), is that the crimes were almost forty years ago.  As Breyer noted (quotations and citations removed):

These lengthy delays create two special constitutional difficulties. First, a lengthy delay in and of itself is especially cruel because it “subjects death row inmates to decades of especially severe, dehumanizing conditions of confinement. Second, lengthy delay undermines the death penalty’s penological rationale. 

Owen's jury was also not unanimous (which the Supreme Court later deemed illegitimate) in handing down a death sentence. They decided death by a vote of 10-2.  Again, the justices (Sotomayor has flagged the issue in the past) accepted this in past cases.  

The final issue, which still would be an issue under currently accepted law if proven, is that there is a claim he is mentally unfit at this time. The Supreme Court in the 1980s said that it was unconstitutional to execute the insane, even if you aren't insane at the time of the crime.  The claim here is that he is mentally unfit enough to meet that general limit.

The governor held things up to have the matter be examined, but his lawyers claimed that the finding that he is mentally fit was cursory and inappropriate.  The Supreme Court didn't think much of the arguments, disposing of things a day early.  No comment.  Maybe, the arguments are not really novel and/or worth much notice, but I still think a few words of explanation from someone would have been appropriate.  Oh well.  

He was executed.  Meanwhile, someone was eventually found not guilty of capital murder and was released from death row after decades.  The Supreme Court (6-3) earlier rejected an attempt to obtain relief.  

(The second tweet is from a useful compiler of death penalty news, who also flagged bias of those who provided medical testimony.)