FL: Florida drops death penalty pursuit for man accused of child sex abuse

Source: tampabay.com 2/2/24

The state attorney in Lake County said the case’s quick resolution could be attributed to Florida’s new law.

Though Florida prosecutors sought the death penalty for a man accused of sexually abusing a child, making use of a new law Gov. Ron DeSantis signed last year, the accused man instead pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in prison.

Joseph Andrew Giampa, 36, may have been the first person in Florida to face the possibility of a death sentence for a sex crime under the state’s new law. The law, a DeSantis priority, seeks to extend the death penalty to people who sexually abuse children, despite existing U.S. Supreme Court precedent that says the death penalty should not be used for anything other than murder.

Read the full article

 

 

Related posts

Subscribe
Notify of

We welcome a lively discussion with all view points - keeping in mind...

 

  1. Submissions must be in English
  2. Your submission will be reviewed by one of our volunteer moderators. Moderating decisions may be subjective.
  3. Please keep the tone of your comment civil and courteous. This is a public forum.
  4. Swear words should be starred out such as f*k and s*t and a**
  5. Please avoid the use of derogatory labels.  Always use person-first language.
  6. Please stay on topic - both in terms of the organization in general and this post in particular.
  7. Please refrain from general political statements in (dis)favor of one of the major parties or their representatives.
  8. Please take personal conversations off this forum.
  9. We will not publish any comments advocating for violent or any illegal action.
  10. We cannot connect participants privately - feel free to leave your contact info here. You may want to create a new / free, readily available email address that are not personally identifiable.
  11. Please refrain from copying and pasting repetitive and lengthy amounts of text.
  12. Please do not post in all Caps.
  13. If you wish to link to a serious and relevant media article, legitimate advocacy group or other pertinent web site / document, please provide the full link. No abbreviated / obfuscated links. Posts that include a URL may take considerably longer to be approved.
  14. We suggest to compose lengthy comments in a desktop text editor and copy and paste them into the comment form
  15. We will not publish any posts containing any names not mentioned in the original article.
  16. Please choose a short user name that does not contain links to other web sites or identify real people.  Do not use your real name.
  17. Please do not solicit funds
  18. No discussions about weapons
  19. If you use any abbreviation such as Failure To Register (FTR), Person Forced to Register (PFR) or any others, the first time you use it in a thread, please expand it for new people to better understand.
  20. All commenters are required to provide a real email address where we can contact them.  It will not be displayed on the site.
  21. Please send any input regarding moderation or other website issues via email to moderator [at] all4consolaws [dot] org
  22. We no longer post articles about arrests or accusations, only selected convictions. If your comment contains a link to an arrest or accusation article we will not approve your comment.
  23. If addressing another commenter, please address them by exactly their full display name, do not modify their name. 
ACSOL, including but not limited to its board members and agents, does not provide legal advice on this website.  In addition, ACSOL warns that those who provide comments on this website may or may not be legal professionals on whose advice one can reasonably rely.  
 

7 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments

Using the threat of the death penalty in order to extract guilty pleas is an abuse of process and must be challenged in court.

“Gladson said that the quick resolution of the case is proof that the new Florida law is effective.”

That’s a sick statement. Perhaps it’s a quick resolution if the man was guilty, but what if he was innocent? Should the state still be using the threat of death for a quick resolution?
….only in Floriduh.

Interesting on several points…

1) A person with a sex conviction in jail or prison is already serving a potential death sentence given their ranking in the population there

2) Their line of thought is akin to saying the registry works to prevent sex crime convictions (uh huh, yeah, right)

3) Lowering the jury threshold to 75% (8 outta 12) is in line with UCMJ of today where it is the same threshold for non-capital crime cases (which the guvnah learned in the military as an atty there and saw it could be effective to get what he wants…votes (even though the Ramos case says it needs to be unanimous verdicts and capital cases in the military legal system requires unanimous verdicts)

The guy should’ve let it run to get the same life sentence result to prove a point about the FLA thinking.

“Giampa appeared to have been suffering from mental health distress while in jail, according to court records. While in the hospital being treated for self-inflicted wounds on Jan. 24, he attempted to push past deputies and told officers he was trying to escape so that they would shoot him.”

Yeah, sure sounds like a guy who’d be deterred by the death penalty.

If Giampa had good counsel, they would of called Gov Insantis’ bluff. Worst that could happen is that he’ll wait the appeals process out while spending a few more years on death row away from the general population who are waiting to kill him. Even if SCOTUS didn’t uphold precedent and allowed this guy to get the cocktail, I certainly would want to end it right there instead of spending 4 or 5 decades being the most hated man in a Floriduh hell hole prison

I’m positive this has to do with the fact that Governor DeSantis’ campaign was so bad it wasn’t like rearranging deck chairs on the titanic, it was more like rearranging deck chairs on the Hindenburg.