Palm Beach Post

Editorial

 The killers of a killer

It figures. Florida has had to release more death row inmates after they were exonerated than any other state. Now a death row inmate has been murdered, the culprits are obvious, and the state can't convict them.

 Last week, a jury in Bradford County northeast of Gainesville acquitted 3 guards at Florida State Prison who had been charged with the July 1999 beating death of Frank Valdes. Medical examiners counted 22 broken ribs. As the prosecutor noted after the verdict, even the defense attorneys agreed that the guards had stomped Valdes. The question was whether they did so in self-defense or because they had targeted him.

 If defending free speech is hard when the speech is disagreeable, defending justice is harder still when the person is more than disagreeable. Valdes was a career criminal who got the death penalty for his part in a 1987 escape attempt from Glades Correctional Institution. He shot and killed prison guard Fred Griffis. While at FSP, he had stabbed another inmate and threatened to kill a guard. Bradford and neighboring Union counties are home to 5 prisons. Imagine putting the sugar industry on trial in Hendry County.

And yet, if justice in America is to mean anything, it must apply even to the lowest among us. Sentiment in Starke, site of the trial, was that the guards simply meted out the punishment early and saved the state some money. Even on X-wing, however, the state cannot become a vigilante. In July 1999, there were killers at Florida State Prison, and all of them weren't behind bars.