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Courage and clemency: both relics of a bygone era

By MARTIN DYCKMAN
Published July 24, 2005

TALLAHASSEE - Florida history records the courage of two governors, LeRoy Collins and Reubin Askew, for granting clemency to black prisoners whose guilt they doubted. In 1955, Collins spared the life of Walter Lee Irvin in a notorious Lake County rape case. Askew pardoned Freddie Pitts and Wilbert Lee for Gulf County murders that he believed another man had committed.

Often forgotten, however, is the important fact that they couldn't have done it alone. They had to have the approval of at least half the elected Cabinet members serving with them on the state's pardon board, which entailed political risks for them too.

Richard Ervin, the attorney general who had successfully defended Irvin's conviction on appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, signed off on his commutation. So did the other three Cabinet members on the Board of Pardons. Ervin explained that his policy was to support the governor in all such decisions. Ervin later served on the Supreme Court, where he was notably sensitive to apparent injustice. He died last year.

There were six Cabinet members on the board when Askew decided in 1975 that Pitts and Lee should be freed. He could persuade only three, but they were enough. The critical signature was Attorney General Robert Shevin's. He gave it knowing that it would hurt him when he ran for governor in 1978. The Panhandle was already seething over his concession to the Florida Supreme Court that Pitts and Lee deserved a new trial because the state had suppressed evidence during the first one.

Shevin, who had never run well in the Panhandle, did exceptionally poorly there in 1978. Among 15 counties, he carried only Escambia against Bob Graham in the Democratic runoff, and that by only 55 votes. His overall deficit in the Panhandle was 25,634 votes, which was 40 percent of his margin of defeat statewide.

Some of that surely owed to the fact that Graham had chosen a popular Panhandle legislator, Wayne Mixson of Marianna, as his running mate. Shevin would probably have lost regardless of the Pitts-Lee case. But that supposition takes nothing away from the honor his memory deserves for the courage he displayed.

"Losing wasn't all that bad," his widow, Myrna Shevin, said after his death this month. "He went into private practice with some very lucrative cases . . . and put all our kids through school." Shevin might have become a federal appeals court judge if a rival nominee had not been a former law partner of President Carter's attorney general. Shevin eventually served 10 years on Florida's 3rd District Court of Appeal.

Another almost-forgotten fact is that the governor and Cabinet still have the power - and in my view, the duty - to pardon or at least commute the sentences of people whose guilt or degrees of culpability are in doubt. But there hasn't been such an event since the first year of Graham's second term. Executive clemency is a dead letter. The kinder of two explanations is that contemporary officials have a misplaced faith that justice will never miscarry in the courts. The more likely one is that we no longer elect people with the courage of a Collins, an Askew, an Ervin, or a Shevin.

Speaking of elections, House Speaker Allan G. Bense stuck his finger in the public's eye last week. Objecting to a newly proposed initiative that would earmark money to tobacco education, Bense had this to say:

"I think the last place we should have a special requirement for advertising is in the Constitution. If folks are unhappy with the way we spend money, vote us out. Don't put something like that in the Constitution."

He was half-right. Dollar-specific initiatives do not fit any classical definition of what belongs in any state's constitution. But the "vote us out part" was a blunt-instrument insult. How many legislators were voted out last year? None. The only ones who lost were running against others for Senate seats. Only a few of the incumbents even had to work hard.

As my colleague Howard Troxler has pointed out, Florida's immortal incumbents are essentially the same gang of thieves that voted to raise your telephone rates under a mutual agreement to deep-six it as a partisan campaign issue. If that couldn't defeat any of them, nothing can.

Gerrymandering and obscene sums of campaign cash are the primary reasons. Term limits have made it worse, not better, by encouraging even potentially strong challengers to wait until the seats are open.

It would be unrealistic, I suppose, to expect Bense to buck that system. But the least he could do is to refrain from taunting us.

Martin Dyckman's e-mail address is dyckman@sptimes.com

[Last modified July 22, 2005, 20:43:03]