Editorial: Still no accountability for Stoneman Douglas failures

  • Oops!
    Something went wrong.
    Please try again later.
  • Oops!
    Something went wrong.
    Please try again later.
Sun Sentinel Editorial Board, South Florida Sun-Sentinel
·5 min read
  • Oops!
    Something went wrong.
    Please try again later.
  • Oops!
    Something went wrong.
    Please try again later.

Call it one more insult from the Broward County Sheriff’s Office to the families of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas victims.

A judge last week ruled that the agency must reinstate two officers who committed no crime on Feb. 14, 2018 but were guilty of dereliction of duty. The judge didn’t rule on the evidence. He didn’t need to because the sheriff’s office messed up. Again.

Sheriff Gregory Tony fired Sgt. Brian Miller and Deputy Joshua Stambaugh for their inaction on that terrible day. They deserved to lose their jobs.

Miller’s subordinates entered Building 1200 at the high school. Miller did not. Stambaugh, who was off-duty, responded. But he kept far away, observing through binoculars.

The union appealed, and won, because of incompetence.

Florida law requires that law enforcement investigators swear an oath, but the oath administered to sheriff’s office investigators excluded a line swearing that they had initialed the report and that the facts in it were true and accurate as far as the investigators knew. In addition, the agency waited two days too long in Miller’s case and 13 days too long in Stambaugh’s case to investigate and discipline them.

Arbitrators thus recommended reinstatement, with all back pay and benefits. Broward County Circuit Judge Keathen Frink upheld their decision. However Frink might have felt about what Miller and Stambaugh didn’t do, the judge had no choice.

Jeff Bell is president of the deputies’ union. He called Frink’s ruling “a great victory.” His comment serves as another reminder that law enforcement unions are about job protection and increased benefits, not public safety.

Broward County School Board member Lori Alhadeff lost her daughter in the shooting. After Frink’s ruling, Alhadeff said there has been “no accountability” for what happened at Stoneman Douglas. She’s right, even if there are limits on the accountability some victims’ relatives might want.

We have editorialized against the criminal prosecution of Scot Peterson, the former deputy who infamously lingered outside while the shooter fired. As Peterson’s attorneys pointed out, even the Broward County State Attorney’s Office conceded that Peterson could have not prevented the 11 killings on the first floor. And if Peterson had followed protocols, he would not have had time to reach the third floor, where six others were killed.

But Peterson did deserve to lose his job. After reporting that shots had been fired, he told other deputies not to enter the building. He stayed outside for 48 minutes.

That standard should apply to all the others who failed to respond adequately. It does not matter that a quicker response might not have prevented more killings. It matters only that the response was collectively terrible.

In Florida and most states, however, it’s very hard to fire law enforcement officers. The “Police Bill of Rights,” which the Legislature approved after lobbying by the union, makes it hard for even the most reform-minded sheriff or police chief to maintain high standards.

Daniel Oates was police chief in Miami Beach from 2013 to 2019 after holding the same job in two cities outside of Florida. Writing last year in The Washington Post, Oates explained how the process favors officers at risk of getting fired.

An officer, Oates noted, is interviewed only at the end of an investigation. In Florida, “State law guarantees him, and his lawyer, an opportunity to review every bit of evidence — every witness statement, any video, all the physical evidence — before he talks to internal affairs.

“This enables the officer to cast his actions in the best possible light — even to lie about what happened, once he knows the evidence will not disprove the lie. In subsequent arbitration, this becomes a critical tactical advantage.”

After the union seized on the technicality in the cases of Miller and Stambaugh, arbitrators ruled in their favor. The case of Edward Eason, whom Tony also fired for his inaction at Stoneman Douglas, is before an arbitrator. The same technicality almost certainly will keep him on the job.

Last September, Bell tried to duck his organization’s role in creating this biased system. “The union,” Bell said, “always gets blamed for bringing back these so-called bad people that the agency has employed, but the problem is that it is the agency that does things wrong and we point out their errors and that’s what leads these people to come back.”

Consider that Miller, Stambaugh and Eason didn’t face the possibility of criminal charges — just the loss of their job. And unless the sheriff’s office successfully appeals, which seems unlikely, they will face no accountability.

It’s been that way in Florida for decades. In 1991, two West Palm Beach officers beat an unarmed man to death. They were acquitted on second-degree murder charges. One man left the state. The other got his job back.

We acknowledge that the trail of accountability for Stoneman Douglas is long. It includes those in Congress who let the 1994 assault weapons ban lapse. It includes those in the Florida Legislature who refused to ban such weapons here. It includes those in the Broward County School District who lost track of the shooter and then lied about it. It includes those at the FBI who didn’t follow up on tips about the shooter.

The Stoneman Douglas families have seen all those bureaucracies dodge accountability. Now a bureaucratic lapse at the sheriff’s office and a rigged system have left them frustrated again.

Recommended Stories

  • Jon Bernthal, Jamie Hector, Josh Charles to Star in HBO Series ‘We Own This City’ From ‘The Wire’ Team

    Jon Bernthal, Josh Charles, and Jamie Hector are set for three of the lead roles in the HBO limited series “We Own This City” from the team behind “The Wire.” In addition to the castings, Reinaldo Marcus Green has joined the series as director and executive producer. Variety reported that the series was set up at […]

  • The Simpsons ‘predicted’ US gas shortage back in 2010, say fans on Twitter

    ‘The Simpsons writers must have had a time machine,’ joked one fan

  • Florida-run COVID testing sites closing at the end of May. Where can you go next?

    All state-run testing sites in Florida will close by the end of May — including the sites at Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Gardens and C.B. Smith Park in Pembroke Pines.

  • Thailand is considering releasing 50,000 prisoners early amid a surge in COVID-19 cases in its crowded prisons

    On Monday, more than 70% of Thailand's new reported cases were found in prisons. The country is now considering releasing 16% of its prison population.

  • Wake schools go to court and recover $1.2 million from illegal bail bond scheme

    Bail bond records had been altered in more than 300 cases, depriving the school system of more than $1 million.

  • Oil futures end at lowest in over 3 weeks as stocks decline, U.S. crude supplies rise

    Oil futures decline on Wednesday, tracking a slump in global equities as data from the Energy Information Administration show an increase in weekly U.S. crude inventories, contributing to a drop to the lowest settlement prices in more than three weeks.

  • Brent Oil Slumps With Iran Optimistic on Sanctions Relief

    (Bloomberg) -- Brent crude extended declines after Iran’s president said the broad outline of a deal to end sanctions on its oil had been reached.Futures in London lost 1.8%, after slumping 3% on Wednesday. President Hassan Rouhani struck an optimistic tone in comments released by Iranian state television, saying the deal would see oil, shipping, insurance and central bank sanctions lifted. But he noted there are still some issues to be discussed, and his remarks largely echoed those from European Union officials on Wednesday.The prospect of a return of supply from the OPEC member state is being reflected in Brent’s prompt timespread, with its backwardation narrowing to just a few cents, a sign that market tightness may be easing.While Brent briefly topped $70 a barrel earlier in the week, it has struggled to sustain that move. The market has been rattled by the outlook for Iranian production, though a timeline for a deal remains unclear. There’s also been a selloff in global markets, while the coronavirus continues to impinge on Indian demand, trimming sales of gasoline and diesel by as much as 20% for top refiner Indian Oil Corp.A “revival of Iranian oil exports takes a lot of attention currently,” said Bjarne Schieldrop, chief commodities analyst at SEB AB. “The key question is when” a deal will be reached, he said.Enrique Mora, the EU official in charge of coordinating diplomacy in Vienna for the nuclear talks, said he expects all parties to return to the 2015 agreement before Iran’s presidential elections on June 18. Citigroup Inc. sees an initial 500,000-barrel-a-day increase in supply from around the middle of the third quarter.More stories like this are available on bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2021 Bloomberg L.P.

  • Gaza Conflict Stokes 'Identity Crisis' for Young American Jews

    Dan Kleinman does not know quite how to feel. As a child in the New York City borough of Brooklyn, he was taught to revere Israel as the protector of Jews everywhere, the “Jewish superman who would come out of the sky to save us” when things got bad, he said. It was a refuge in his mind when white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, chanted “Jews will not replace us,” or kids in college grabbed his shirt, mimicking a “South Park” episode to steal his “Jew gold.” Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times But his feelings have grown muddier as he has gotten older, especially now as he watches violence unfold in Israel and Gaza. His moral compass tells him to help the Palestinians, but he cannot shake an ingrained paranoia every time he hears someone make anti-Israel statements. “It is an identity crisis,” Kleinman, 33, said. “Very small in comparison to what is happening in Gaza and the West Bank, but it is still something very strange and weird.” As the violence escalates in the Middle East, turmoil of a different kind is growing across the Atlantic. Many young American Jews are confronting the region’s long-standing strife in a very different context, with very different pressures, from their parents’ and grandparents’ generations. The Israel of their lifetime has been powerful, no longer appearing to some to be under constant existential threat. The violence comes after a year when mass protests across the United States have changed how many Americans see issues of racial and social justice. The pro-Palestinian position has become more common, with prominent progressive members of Congress offering impassioned speeches in defense of the Palestinians on the House floor. At the same time, reports of anti-Semitism are rising across the country. Divides between some American Jews and Israel’s right-wing government have been growing for more than a decade, but under the Trump administration those fractures that many hoped would heal became a crevasse. Politics in Israel have also remained fraught, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s long-tenured government forged allegiances with Washington. For young people who came of age during the Trump years, political polarization over the issue only deepened. Many Jews in America remain unreservedly supportive of Israel and its government. Still, the events of recent weeks have left some families struggling to navigate both the crisis abroad and the wide-ranging response from American Jews at home. What is at stake is not just geopolitical, but deeply personal. Fractures are intensifying along lines of age, observance and partisan affiliation. In suburban Livingston, New Jersey, Meara Ashtivker, 38, has been afraid for her father-in-law in Israel, who has a disability and is not able to rush to the stairwell to shelter when he hears the air-raid sirens. She is also scared as she sees people in her progressive circles suddenly seem anti-Israel and anti-Jewish, she said. Ashtivker, whose husband is Israeli, said she loved and supported Israel, even when she did not always agree with the government and its actions. “It’s really hard being an American Jew right now,” she said. “It is exhausting and scary.” Some young, liberal Jewish activists have found common cause with Black Lives Matter, which explicitly advocates for Palestinian liberation, concerning others who see that allegiance as anti-Semitic. The recent turmoil is the first major outbreak of violence in Israel and Gaza for which Aviva Davis, who graduated this spring from Brandeis University, has been “socially conscious.” “I’m on a search for the truth, but what’s the truth when everyone has a different way of looking at things?” Davis said. Alyssa Rubin, 26, who volunteers in Boston with IfNotNow, a network of Jewish activists who want to end Jewish American support for Israeli occupation, has found protesting for the Palestinian cause to be its own form of religious observance. She said she and her 89-year-old grandfather ultimately both want the same thing, Jewish safety. But “he is really entrenched in this narrative that the only way we can be safe is by having a country,” she said, while her generation has seen that “the inequality has become more exacerbated.” In the protest movements last summer, “a whole new wave of people were really primed to see the connection and understand racism more explicitly,” she said, “understanding the ways racism plays out here, and then looking at Israel/Palestine and realizing it is the exact same system.” But that comparison is exactly what worries many other American Jews, who say the history of white American slaveholders is not the correct frame for viewing the Israeli government or the global Jewish experience of oppression. At Temple Concord, a Reform synagogue in Syracuse, New York, teenager after teenager started calling Rabbi Daniel Fellman last week, wondering how to process seeing Black Lives Matter activists they marched with last summer attack Israel as “an apartheid state.” “The reaction today is different because of what has occurred with the past year, year and a half, here,” Fellman said. “As a Jewish community, we are looking at it through slightly different eyes.” Nearby at Sha’arei Torah Orthodox Congregation of Syracuse, teenagers were reflecting on their visits to Israel and on their family in the region. “They see it as Hamas being a terrorist organization that is shooting missiles onto civilian areas,” Rabbi Evan Shore said. “They can’t understand why the world seems to be supporting terrorism over Israel.” In Colorado, a high school senior at Denver Jewish Day School said he was frustrated at the lack of nuance in the public conversation. When his social media apps filled with pro-Palestinian memes last week, slogans like “From the river to the sea” and “Zionism is a call for an apartheid state,” he deactivated his accounts. “The conversation is so unproductive, and so aggressive, that it really stresses you out,” Jonas Rosenthal, 18, said. “I don’t think that using that message is helpful for convincing the Israelis to stop bombing Gaza.” Compared with their elders, younger American Jews are overrepresented on the ends of the religious affiliation spectrum: a higher share are secular, and a higher share are Orthodox. Ari Hart, 39, an Orthodox rabbi in Skokie, Illinois, has accepted the fact that his Zionism makes him unwelcome in some activist spaces where he would otherwise be comfortable. College students in his congregation are awakening to that same tension, he said. “You go to a college campus and want to get involved in anti-racism or social justice work, but if you support the state of Israel, you’re the problem,” he said. Hart sees increasing skepticism in liberal Jewish circles over Israel’s right to exist. “This is a generation who are very moved and inspired by social justice causes and want to be on the right side of justice,” Hart said. “But they’re falling into overly simplistic narratives, and narratives driven by true enemies of the Jewish people.” Overall, younger American Jews are less attached to Israel than older generations: About half of Jewish adults under 30 describe themselves as emotionally connected to Israel, compared with about two-thirds of Jews over age 64, according to a major survey published last week by the Pew Research Center. And though the U.S. Jewish population is 92% white, with all other races combined accounting for 8%, among Jews ages 18 to 29 that rises to 15%. In Los Angeles, Rachel Sumekh, 29, a first-generation Iranian American Jew, sees complicated layers in the story of her own Persian family. Her mother escaped Iran on the back of a camel, traveling by night until she got to Pakistan, where she was taken in as a refugee. She then found asylum in Israel. She believes Israel has a right to self-determination, but she also found it “horrifying” to hear an Israeli ambassador suggest other Arab countries should take in Palestinians. “That is what happened to my people and created this intergenerational trauma of losing our homeland because of hatred,” she said. The entire situation feels too volatile and dangerous for many people to even want to discuss, especially publicly. Violence against Jews is increasingly close to home. Last year the third-highest number of anti-Semitic incidents in the United States were recorded since the Anti-Defamation League began cataloging them in 1979, according to a report released by the civil rights group last month. The ADL recorded more than 1,200 incidents of anti-Semitic harassment in 2020, a 10% increase from the previous year. In Los Angeles, the police are investigating a sprawling attack on sidewalk diners at a sushi restaurant Tuesday as an anti-Semitic hate crime. Outside Cleveland, Jennifer Kaplan, 39, who grew up in a modern Orthodox family and who considers herself a centrist Democrat and a Zionist, remembered studying abroad at Hebrew University in 2002, and being in the cafeteria minutes before it was bombed. Now she wondered how the Trump era had affected her inclination to see the humanity in others, and she wished her young children were a bit older so she could talk with them about what is happening. “I want them to understand that this is a really complicated situation, and they should question things,” she said. “I want them to understand that this isn’t just a, I don’t know, I guess, utopia of Jewish religion.” Esther Katz, the performing arts director at the Jewish Community Center in Omaha, Nebraska, has spent significant time in Israel. She also attended Black Lives Matter protests in Omaha last summer and has signs supporting the movement in the windows of her home. She has watched with a sense of betrayal as some of her allies in that movement have posted online about their apparently unequivocal support for the Palestinians, and compared Israel to Nazi Germany. “I’ve had some really tough conversations,” said Katz, a Conservative Jew. “They’re not seeing the facts, they’re just reading the propaganda.” Her three children, who range in age from 7 to 13, are now wary of a country that is for Katz one of the most important places in the world. “They’re like, ‘I don’t understand why anyone would want to live in Israel, or even visit,’” she said. “That breaks my heart.” This article originally appeared in The New York Times. © 2021 The New York Times Company

  • Review: A chilling 'Final Account' by witnesses and perpetrators of World War II Nazi atrocities

    Director Luke Holland's documentary "Final Account" includes interviews with some of the last surviving members of Hitler's Third Reich.

  • Johnny Depp is suing ACLU to uncover whether Amber Heard really donated her $7 million divorce settlement to charity

    Following the pair's divorce, Heard said she would donate all $7 million of her settlement to the ACLU and the Children's Hospital Los Angeles.

  • The 35 House Republicans who defied Trump and voted for the January 6 commission

    Thirty-five House Republicans on Wednesday voted in favor of a bill to establish an investigation into the January 6 attack on the Capitol building.

  • Salma Hayek said she wasn't cast in 2 'big comedies' because she's Mexican

    Hayek said that the directors loved her auditions for two big comedy movies, but that the studios wouldn't go "for a Mexican as the lead."

  • The US quietly told Israel it can't publicly support its aggression in Gaza for much longer, report says

    Blinken told his Israeli counterpart he expects the conflict to wind down, Axios reported. Israel on Wednesday vowed to press on with the offensive.

  • Thanks to Kobach, Trump and conservative think tank, we know extent of voter fraud

    So how many fraudulent voters did Kobach’s dragnet find during his eight-year tenure in office? Just nine.

  • Kansas prosecutor says no to rape charge, so college student calls her own grand jury

    “It took me a while to find my voice. But I have found it, and I am going to use it.”

  • Nearly half of GOP voters indicate they’d vote for Trump in 2024 Republican primary, according to new poll

    48 per cent of GOP voters say they would vote for Donald Trump in 2024 Republican primary

  • 7 rural counties in Oregon that voted for Trump have voted to secede from the blue state and join Idaho

    "Idaho respects traditional morality and justice, and it doesn't get in the way of rural livelihoods," a group pushing the ballot measures says.

  • Stephen Colbert Can’t Believe Mike Pence’s Own Brother Sold Him Out

    CBSStephen Colbert on Wednesday criticized Republicans who opposed legislation establishing a commission to investigate the deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol in January that then-President Donald Trump helped incite.GOP House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Minority Whip Steve Scalise came out against the bill, even though its components were the result of an agreement struck by Republican Rep. John Katko of New York.Katko, as Colbert pointed out, is one of 29 Republican lawmakers who, along with an equal number of Democrats, make up the Problem Solvers Caucus.“Hey, I thought all members of the House were supposed to be members of the Problem Solvers Caucus. That’s why we send them to Washington,” the late-night host quipped. “Though I guess these days a lot of them go down to Mar-a-Lago to meet with ‘the problem.’”In explaining their opposition to the bill, McCarthy and Scalise for some reason claimed the commission it creates should also investigate Black Lives Matter protests, antifa, and the death of a U.S. Capitol police officer in April.Stephen King on Scary Stalkers, Being ‘Canceled’ by J.K. Rowling, and Navigating Trauma“OK, but it’s the Commission on January 6,” Colbert noted. “That’s like being upset that the movie Halloween doesn’t investigate what happened on Arbor Day.”The bill ultimately passed, with 35 Republicans supporting it and 175 voting against it. One ‘no’ vote came from Indiana Rep. Greg Pence, the brother of former Vice President Mike Pence, whose name was chanted at the Jan. 6 riot by those who wanted him hanged.“That certainly changes the meaning to this text from Greg: ‘Hey bro! Wanna hang this weekend?’” Colbert joked.The bill now heads to the Senate, where its fate is uncertain. Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) on Wednesday asserted that the legislation is “slanted and unbalanced,” even though it gives each party the same number of appointments and subpoena power.Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

  • Texas executes Quintin Jones for 1999 murder, says it forgot to let the media witness execution

    Texas executed Quintin Jones, 41, on Wednesday night, for the 1999 beating death of his great aunt, Berthena Bryant. He was pronounced dead at 6:40 p.m. at the state penitentiary in Huntsville, according to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. The reporters waiting across the street to witness the execution were never called over and only learned of Jones' death 30 minutes after he was pronounced dead, The Associated Press reports. "The previous 570 executions carried out by Texas since capital punishment resumed in 1982 all had at least one media witness," AP reports, and The Huntsville Item noted that state policy guarantees an AP and Item reporter access to witness executions. "The Texas Department of Criminal Justice can only apologize for this error and nothing like this will ever happen again," TDCJ spokesman Jeremy Desel told AP and The Item. "Somewhere in that mix there was never a phone call made to this office for me to accompany the witnesses across the street into the Huntsville Unit," and "my assumption is there will be a thorough investigation." A flurry of appeals were rejected by various courts in the days leading up to Jones' execution, culminating in the U.S. Supreme Court's rejection of a stay Wednesday evening. Supporters of clemency for Jones noted that family members, including his great aunt's only sibling, had pleaded for his sentence to be commuted to life in prison. Jones personally pleaded with Gov. Greg Abbott (R) in an interview with The New York Times. The Texas parole board denied Jones' petition on Tuesday and Abbott declined to step in. Abbott, who said "our creator endowed us with the right to life" earlier Wednesday when he signed one of the nation's most stringent laws limiting legal access to abortion, has granted clemency to only one death row inmate, Thomas Whitaker, since taking office in 2015, out of more than 50 people executed on his watch. The Jones and Whitaker cases are similar, and Jones' lawyers filed a late petition arguing that the parole board had supported clemency for Whitaker, who is white, but denied it for Jones due to race. A judge denied the petition. Prosecutors argued against clemency because Jones had exhibited violent behavior as a youth and admitted involvement in two other murders. The white man convicted of those two murders, Riky Roosa, is serving life in prison and will become eligible for parole in 2039, The Texas Tribune notes. More stories from theweek.comStephen Breyer is delusional about the Supreme CourtThe enormous downside of another long, public Trump investigation that comes to nothingLate night hosts denude the GOP's Jan. 6 historical revisionism, attempts to 'All Riots Matter' the commission

  • Michael Cohen says he believes Trump will 'flip on all of them,' including his children, in New York investigations into his company

    Cohen, Trump's former lawyer and fixer who is cooperating with prosecutors, said: "I really believe that Donald Trump cares for only himself."