In a press release today, Rehwinkel Vasilinda says she introduced the bill due to “growing concerns over the possible execution of wrongfully convicted prisoners and the exorbitant cost to the state.” House Bill 4051 would “delete provisions providing for death penalty for capital felonies.”

According to Rehwinkel Vasilinda’s press release:

“I’m not in the business of dispensing vengeance. As a state representative, I am in the business of making decisions to help keep Floridians safe from crime while spending taxpayer money prudently. HB 4051 will achieve both goals,” said Representative Michelle Rehwinkel Vasilinda.

Executions are carried out at staggering cost to taxpayers. In its 2000 report, “The High Price of Killing Killers,” the Palm Beach Post found that Florida spent approximately $51 million each year to enforce the death penalty.

…

The recent protests and national concern over the execution of Troy Davis is emblematic of the lack of trust more and more people are demonstrating in the justice and accuracy of state sponsored executions. That is not good for the respect and dignity for the law.

“One of the underlying questions in the debate about state-sponsored executions is what is the proper role and place of government? The appropriate question for state government is how do we keep people safe from crime in the most cost effective way? When you analyze the numbers, state sponsored execution is not the correct answer,” says Rep. Rehwinkel Vasilinda.

Her statement was released the day before the state of Florida is set to execute a man who was convicted of killing a Coral Gables police officer 33 years ago.

According to The Miami Herald, “Manuel Valle is scheduled to be executed at 4 p.m. Wednesday, more than eight weeks after his original execution date.”

Vasilinda said “it cost at least $51 million a year and over 30 years to arrive at the day of execution for Manuel Valle, who is scheduled to be put to death by what may be Governor Scott’s first signature on a death warrant.”

“With that $51 million we could put 850 law enforcement officers on Florida’s streets, as well as adding more FDLE investigators and equipment to our arsenal against crime,” she said.

“The refusal…by the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles to grant Troy Davis clemency underscores the vast systemic injustices that plague our death penalty system,” Denny LeBoeuf, the director of the Capital Punishment Project of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), said in a statement. “The death penalty system in the United States is arbitrary, discriminatory and comes at an enormous cost to taxpayers, and it must be ended.”

Instances of doubt, such as the case of Troy Davis, first and foremost highlight the grave cost of taking the life of a man who has continued to proclaim his innocence since the start of his prosecution. But additional housing and prosecutions costs, especially heavy in death penalty cases, add up in cash-strapped states that continue to use the death penalty. In California, keeping an individual on the maximum-security death row costs $90,000 annually per inmate, and with the state’s current death row population of 670, the cost is $63.3 million annually, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

The cost of the entire system in California, including prosecutions and court cases, is $137 million per year — if the number of crimes that encompass the death penalty were narrowed, a report by the Center notes, the cost of the system would narrow to $130 million per year.

The Federal Office of Defender Services found that defending a murder trial in which the death penalty is sought — an average of $620,932 per prisoner — is eight times that of a murder case where is it not sought.

Davis, as I’ve explained before, has been on death row in Georgia since 1989, when he was found guilty of killing an off-duty police officer based on the testimony of nine eyewitnesses. There was no physical evidence directly linking him to the crime, however,  and seven of the nine witnesses have since recanted their earlier statements. Another man has also boasted of committing the crime and new witnesses have said that other man was the real perpetrator. Some of the original witnesses claim they were pressured by police to identify Davis.

Despite multiple hearings at various state and federal courts on the issue, every court until yesterday had decided that the new evidence should not be considered.

Those judges all apparently agreed with Justice Antonin Scalia’s dissent yesterday, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, in which he called the new hearing “a fool’s errand” and said: “This court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is ‘actually’ innocent.”

While Ashby Jones of zyhe Wall Street Journal’s Law Blog today calls that a “fascinating question,” it’s a question that only a lawyer can love.

In fact, even Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, no flaming liberal, wrote in 1993 that “we may assume … that in a capital case a truly persuasive demonstration of ‘actual innocence’ made after trial would render the execution of a defendant unconstitutional and warrant federal habeas relief,” as Adam Liptak points out today in The New York Times.

Fortunately, a majority of justices on Monday decided that the possibility of “actual innocence” as demonstrated by the facts of Davis’s case was sufficient to require the federal judge to at least hear the evidence. 

“The Court’s decision means that we may finally know whether Georgia sought to execute an innocent man and allowed the real perpetrator to escape,” said Virginia Sloan, president of the Constitution Project, which submitted a brief on Davis’s behalf.