Just why are the "waits" on Florida's death row so long?

The question in the title of this post is prompted by this local article, headlined "Inmate on death row since 1980 set to die" which discusses not only today's scheduled execution in Florida, but also the state's long history of having those condemned to death wait a long time for an actual date with the execution chamber.  Here are excerpts:

A twice-convicted murderer who has lived on Florida’s death row for more than three decades is scheduled to die by lethal injection this week for killing a St. Petersburg mother — but like many executions, why he is being killed now and why it didn’t happen years ago are both something of a mystery.

If 65-year-old Robert Brian Waterhouse is executed Wednesday at Florida State Prison near Starke, he will have lingered on death row longer than any of the previous 276 people executed by the state, according to the Department of Corrections.  He’s spent more than 31 years mostly by himself in a 6-by-9-foot cell as his various appeals worked their way through the courts.

Just 18 of the 395 people currently on death row have been there longer than Waterhouse, who was sentenced in September 1980 for raping and killing 29-year-old Deborah Kammerer.

No one in Gov. Rick Scott’s office would talk in detail about the process that led him to pick Waterhouse over others whose appeals have run their course.  It’s the third death warrant Scott has signed since taking office in January 2011....

Asked about it at an appearance in Tampa last week, Scott said he sits down with a team of staffers and goes through the roster of death row inmates who have exhausted their appeals.  “I spend a lot of time praying about it and thinking about it, and it’s a hard decision,” he said. “There is not ever one issue” that leads to an inmate being selected to die.

Others familiar with the process say that because many condemned inmates’ cases are in various stages of appeal and new litigation is filed all the time, there is never a clear choice for the governor.

The attorney general’s office is charged with keeping track of the status of cases, and generally responds to requests from the governor regarding individual inmates who’ve been through their major appeals and the clemency process, and would likely be unsuccessful with any appeals filed after the death warrant is signed.  Typically, they’ re inmates who haven’t initiated any new litigation in years.

Craig Trocino, who handled death row appeals for years before going to work for a University of Miami law school clinic, said the “incredibly secretive” nature of the governor’s selection process has always disturbed death penalty opponents. “There was no logic to any it, as far as we could tell, and nobody was speaking about it,” Trocino said....

University of Florida law professor George R. “Bob” Dekle, a former prosecutor who sent notorious serial killer Ted Bundy to death row, said Florida governors have rarely been forthcoming about the reasons they select one inmate over all the others for execution.

Dekle said appellate lawyers do their best to make sure it’s not an easy choice for the governor.  They file whatever they can for as long as they can to keep their cases alive in the courts.  New issues based on recent court rulings and changes in the law provide new fodder for appeals all the time, he said.  “It’s guerilla warfare,” Dekle said.  “As long as you can put it off, as long as you can delay, as long as you can keep the thing going in any way, shape or form possible, that’s how much time you’ve got.”

The remarkable fact that Robert Brian Waterhouse has been on death row in Florida since the Carter Administration is made even more remarkable by the fact that there are 18 killers on Florida's death row who have been there even longer!  Because apparently none of these 18 long-timers have a scheduled execution date, and because Florida has averaged only about two execution per year over the last decade, it seems quite possible (even likely?) that some Sunshine State murderer may end up living a full half-century on Florida's death row.  Wow.

As regular readers know, so-called "guerilla warfare" in litigation by those who represent condemned inmates is not at all unique to Florida.  Moreover, the Eleventh Circuit does not have a long record (as does, say, the Ninth Circuit) of reversing lots and lots of death sentences.  Thus, I cannot help but think Florida's state courts and/or its prosecutors may best account for why capital justice drags on so very long in the state.  But perhaps in-the-know readers have more informed insights on just what slows down so dramatically the march to the death chamber in Florida (and, for that matter, whether anyone really cares all that much about how slow this march has come to be).