Florida Awards $1 Million for 2 Prison Terms

Legislators awarded two black men $500,000 each Thursday for the 12 years they spent in prison--wrongly convicted, they say, of the 1963 murders of two white gas station attendants.

The Republican-controlled House passed the measure, versions of which had languished in both chambers for nearly two decades, with just one day remaining in the legislative session.

Gov. Lawton Chiles, a Democrat, is expected to approve the payments, which also would include $125,000 in legal expenses for Freddie Pitts, 54, and Wilbert Lee, 62. The payments would be made if an administrative law judge determines the state is guilty of a wrongful act. That decision must come by July 1.

“We thank God that the speaker [of the House] and some of the rest of them had the heart to get us from where we were 22 years ago,” Lee said.

The bill, approved Tuesday by the Senate, passed in the House by a 105-11 vote.

Pitts and Lee say authorities beat them into confessing. Then-Gov. Reubin Askew pardoned Pitts and Lee in 1975, citing substantial doubt about either man’s guilt.

Grover Floyd and Jesse Burkett were killed at a gas station in the Panhandle paper mill town of Port St. Joe in 1963.

Pitts and Lee told a grand jury they were innocent and had people who provided alibis. But one witness changed her story, and the pair pleaded guilty to first-degree murder. They were sentenced to death.