All federal executions are carried out in Terre Haute. (AP Photo/Michael Conroy)
A Florida prosecutor hopes to re-try two prisoners on federal death row who received clemency from outgoing president Joe Biden.
State attorney Tom Bakkedahl said Tuesday he was opening an investigation into the murders of four family members, including two young children, in 2006.
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A federal jury in Florida sentenced Daniel Troya and Ricardo Sanchez, Jr. to death in connection with the killings in 2009. Both men are incarcerated at a U.S. penitentiary in Terre Haute that houses federal death row after Biden commuted their sentences to life without parole in a mass clemency decision at the end of his presidency.
“ If you don't like the death penalty, the mechanism you utilize to remove it is to vote it out,” state attorney Tom Bakkedahl said Tuesday. “The people of the United States of America have said, ‘We want a federal death penalty.’ And yet this administration, the former administration, took it upon themselves to override the will of the people.”
Citing a “crisis in the confidence of the criminal justice system,” Bakkedahl said he was stepping in to follow the law and its application.
Bakkedahl said that on the day Biden issued the commutation of 37 federal death sentences, including the two in Florida, he reached out to the newly elected sheriff and told him, “We’ve got to do something about this. This can’t stand.”
The state attorney acknowledged the difficulty in pursing a case nearly 20 years after the murders of Yessica and Luis Escobedo along with their two young sons, Luis Julian and Luis Damian, in Ft. Pierce, Florida.
“We are going to have to track down hundreds of witnesses. We are going to have … tens of thousands of documents. We're going to have to locate evidence spread far and wide. This is a massive undertaking we are engaged in,” he said.
Before prosecutors could seek the death penalty, Bakkedahl would have to take the evidence to a Florida grand jury to pursue new charges.
Critics of the plan say securing new death sentences will take years, and Troya and Sanchez, Jr. are unlikely to be executed anytime soon.
“ They were going to die in prison, never going to get out. No more appeals, no more process. And now he just ripped the bandaid off and started that all over again. That doesn’t make any sense,” Maria DeLiberato, executive director of Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, said in an interview Wednesday.
“It's just unfathomable, the amount of resources and expense the State of Florida is going to spend on this for the almost zero chance that these two men will ever be executed,” according to DeLiberato, who is also a capital defense attorney in Florida.
“You've got at least three to five years until a trial even happens. Then assuming a death sentence gets imposed, which it may or may not, then you've got at least another 15 to 20 years of litigation on the death warrant itself,” she said.
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Bakkedahl’s announcement is in line with a day-one executive order urging state officials to pursue charges against the Biden clemency recipients.
The order, ahead of Attorney General Pam Bondi’s appointment, urged justice officials to “evaluate whether these offenders can be charged with State capital crimes and shall recommend appropriate action to state and local authorities.”
The U.S. Constitution prohibits trying someone twice for the same crime but U.S. courts generally recognize the state and federal systems as separate.
