By BRANDON LARRABEE
THE NEWS SERVICE OF FLORIDA
With all due respect to Kermit the Frog, it’s getting easier to be green in Florida.
With more than 3,000 people descending on Central Florida for the nation’s premiere cannabis business trade show this week, and a new poll again showing that voters seem poised to approve wide-ranging medical marijuana, it looks increasingly like the state might be going to pot.
There are still obstacles for those who would allow the green leafy substance for medicinal uses, and voters have seemed enthusiastic about the idea before, only to narrowly reject the idea. But optimism seems to be abundant in the industry, and not just because of contact highs.
This week, polls also showed a tight race for Florida’s 29 electoral college votes — tighter than Democrats likely anticipated with the unpredictable Donald Trump in the running — and a still-murky battle for an open U.S. Senate seat that has been overshadowed by the presidential contest.
The fate of the state’s death penalty was also looking cloudier, as a South Florida judge ruled a new version of capital sentencing approved by the Legislature was unconstitutional.
HIGH TIMES FOR MARIJUANA IN FLORIDA?
Kissimmee might not seem like the ideal place for a three-day gathering on the business of pot. Central Florida is more known for family-friendly industries, like Disney and University Studios, than for weed. But organizers said the choice of the Sunshine State was intentional.
“We’re here in Florida, because at all of our national events that we’ve hosted, we’ve had very strong attendance out of Florida,” said Marijuana Business Daily CEO Cassandra Farrington, whose publication organized the convention at the Gaylord Palms Resort & Convention Center. “We are confident that when, and it’s not going to be an if, when Florida legalizes marijuana on a medical or a recreational level, the Florida market is going to be absolutely huge.”
The state is projected to be home to the second-largest population of marijuana consumers if it legalizes medical marijuana.
Florida legalized non-euphoric cannabis for patients with severe muscle spasms or cancer two years ago, though the products aren’t available yet. This year, lawmakers approved full-strength cannabis for terminally ill patients.
But voters will have an opportunity in November to expand things even further if they approve what is known as Amendment 2, largely bankrolled by Orlando trial lawyer John Morgan. The proposal would expand medical marijuana for patients with a broad array of diseases.
“Your market is huge and the demographics are so perfect for cannabis,” said Sara Batterby, president and CEO of Hifi Farms in Hillsborough, Ore., who left her Silicon Valley job as a venture capitalist to start up a grow operation.
Supporters got some good news when a poll released Wednesday by Quinnipiac University showed that 80 percent of voters back the measure. Support for the idea is widespread, with large majorities of Republicans, Democrats, men, women, younger voters and older voters approving.
The backing is well above the 60 percent threshold needed to get the language added to the Constitution. But a similar measure had the same kind of support two years ago, only for the referendum to fall narrowly short of making the cut.
People United for Medical Marijuana, a group that backed the 2014 initiative, tweaked the wording of this year’s proposal to try to help inoculate it against political and legal attacks.
And Morgan spoke Tuesday at the marijuana conference, peppering his 50-minute speech with f-bombs, attacks on the Florida Legislature and a declaration that the future of medical marijuana has reached a “tipping point” in Florida and the nation.
“There is no state in the union that is more ready for this industry than this state,†Morgan said, before closing his speech with a prayer from Mother Teresa and a standing ovation.
FLORIDA, FLORIDA, FLORIDA
Pot supporters were not the only ones eying public opinion surveys this week. With Donald Trump having vanquished his last remaining competitors for the GOP presidential nomination and Hillary Clinton moving ever closer to clinching the Democratic nod, the general election campaign is taking shape. And Florida — once again — looks like a dead heat in the early going.
The Quinnipiac University poll showed Clinton at 43 percent in Florida and Trump at 42 percent. While Clinton is widely expected to win the Democratic nomination, poll numbers are nearly identical when her primary opponent, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, is matched up against Trump — 44 percent for Sanders, 42 percent for Trump.
The poll shows Clinton and Trump are unpopular with huge swaths of Florida voters. Each is viewed favorably by only 37 percent of voters and is seen unfavorably by 57 percent.
Gender gap? It’s almost a gender chasm. Clinton, seeking to become the first woman president, leads by a margin of 48 percent to 35 percent among women, while Trump leads by a margin of 49 percent to 36 percent among men.
And racial or ethnic differences are even more pronounced. Trump leads Clinton by a margin of 52 percent to 33 percent among white voters, while Clinton leads 63-20 among non-white voters. White women are virtually split on the candidates, but Trump leads by a huge margin —- 61 percent to 25 percent — among white men, the poll shows.
“Republicans’ weakness among minority voters is well known,” said Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac Poll, in an analysis accompanying the results. “But the reason this race is so close overall is Clinton’s historic weakness among white men. In Florida, she is getting just 25 percent from white men.”
Things were even less clear in the race to succeed U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, who decided against seeking re-election and instead ran unsuccessfully against Trump and others for the Republican presidential nomination. Democratic Congressman Patrick Murphy, the choice of his party’s establishment, appeared to do slightly better than other Senate candidates in head-to-head matchups in the poll, but large numbers of voters were still undecided.
For instance, Murphy led Republican businessman Carlos Beruff by a margin of 38 percent to 32 percent and led Republican Lt. Gov. Carlos Lopez-Cantera by a margin of 38 percent to 34 percent. He also led Republican businessman Todd Wilcox by a margin of 38 percent to 33 percent. But Murphy was virtually deadlocked with GOP Congressman Ron DeSantis and led Congressman David Jolly by only 3 percentage points.
Matchups between the other leading Democrat in the race, Congressman Alan Grayson, and each of the Republican candidates were within the poll’s 3-point margin of error.
“The Florida U.S. Senate race is wide open with none of the seven candidates particularly well-known to voters,” Brown said.
DEATH PENALTY RULED UNCONSTITUTIONAL — AGAIN
When lawmakers were debating this year how to respond to a U.S. Supreme Court decision that tossed the state’s previous regime for instituting the death penalty, the issues at play in the high court’s ruling weren’t the ones that sparked the biggest debate. What caused most of the division was whether to require the votes of all 12 jurors to impose the death penalty, instead of a majority or supermajority.
In the end, the House and Senate compromised on a proposal that would allow the votes of 10 jurors to impose the death penalty. In a ruling issued Monday, a Miami-Dade County judge said in no uncertain terms that anything less that unanimity wasn’t good enough.
“A 21st-century Floridian seeking to argue that the right purported to be protected by (the state Constitution) does not include the requirement of a unanimous verdict must be prepared to rebut the unequivocal expression of the common law, the received wisdom of 19th-century Florida lawyers and judges, a handful of reported Florida opinions, and a century-and-a-half of shared understanding,” wrote Circuit Judge Milton Hirsch in an 18-page opinion. “And he must be prepared to do so without any ammunition at all, for he will find no Florida cases, no Florida law-review articles, and no Florida history to support his position.”
Hirsch’s findings came in the case of Karon Gaiter, who is charged with one count of first-degree murder. And while Hirsch’s findings were on different grounds, it was rooted in part on the dispute that caused the U.S. Supreme Court in January to strike down the old Florida law.
Under the old capital punishment system, a majority of jurors could issue a death-penalty recommendation that could be followed or ignored by the judge in the case. But under the new law, at least 10 members of the jury must vote for capital punishment in order for a convicted murderer to be put to death; the judge can instead sentence the defendant to life in prison, but can’t impose the death penalty if the jury hasn’t recommended it.
That, Hirsch wrote, essentially changed the jury’s decision from a “straw poll” to a verdict, which has always been understood to require a unanimous vote.
The high court’s 8-1 decision, in a case known as Hurst v. Florida, found that the state’s system of giving judges — and not juries — the power to impose death sentences is an unconstitutional violation of defendants’ Sixth Amendment right to trial by jury.
The Hurst decision dealt with what are known as aggravating circumstances that must be determined before defendants can be sentenced to death. A 2002 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, in a case known as Ring v. Arizona, requires that determinations of such aggravating circumstances must be made by juries, not judges.
Under Florida’s new law, juries will have to unanimously determine “the existence of at least one aggravating factor” before defendants can be eligible for death sentences.
STORY OF THE WEEK: As the marijuana industry held a convention in Central Florida, a new poll showed strong support for pharmacological pot.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK: “Sometimes I go to happy hour and I have one drink. Sometimes I end up closing the bar and wind up at the Waffle House at 3 a.m.”—John Morgan, who said he has “no clue” how much he’ll spend to support the medical marijuana initiative on this year’s ballot.
