The legislators also moved to allow the state to execute with lethal injection those prisoners who are convicted of murder. Governor Jeb Bush indicated he will rapidly sign these bills into law.

After the bloody death of Allen Davis in Florida's electric chair last July, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to decide whether electrocution is constitutional. Only Florida, Alabama, Georgia, and Nebraska use the electric chair as the sole means of execution. To insure executions continue uninterrupted, the legislators passed the lethal injection bill nearly unanimously.

The appeals bill limits the number of trips prisoners can make to the state courts and sets shorter, stricter deadlines for filing appeals. The bill also bars second appeals unless prisoners can prove a constitutional violation, such as the withholding of evidence, or unless they have evidence of their innocence.

Florida has been forced to free 20 prisoners from death row because of questions about their guilt, more than any state in the nation. Last year, the state Supreme Court found fault with three-quarters of all death sentences it reviewed.

Two proposed amendments were set aside with the promise to take them up at some other time. One was to ban the execution of the mentally retarded, the other to allow a prisoner to appeal if he could prove racial bias in the prosecutor's decision to seek the death penalty.

Freddie Pitts listened to the debate on the race-based appeals amendment from the gallery of the Senate and said, "The debate should be on ending capital punishment altogether."

Pitts, along with codefendant Wilbert Lee, spent nine years on Florida's Death Row for two murders that they did not commit.

"After listening to this for the last two days, I am glad that I'm not on Death Row right now, because I'd be history," Pitts told legislators. "The problem with eroding constitutional protections for political expediency is that one of these days you may be on the other side of the law," he said. "That's when you'll feel the frustration and the helplessness of trying to prove that you should be treated better by the law."

Pitts said he has lost count of the trips he has made to Tallahassee over the years. Last March he testified before the Massachusetts legislature, which was considering bringing back the death penalty there. That proposal was defeated.

"I don't know of anything else more important right now," Pitts said. "It's something I feel that I've got to do."

Rachele Fruit is a member of the International Association of Machinists.  
 
 
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