Gov. Ron DeSantis is on pace to set a record for the number of executions in one year, having already presided over the deaths of five convicted murderers by the end of May, with two more scheduled to die in June.
The seven death warrants DeSantis signed so far this year are the most by a Florida governor since 1984 and 2014 when the governors then – the late U.S. Sen. Bob Graham and current U.S. Sen. Rick Scott – signed eight.
“In 2023 when DeSantis was running for president, we saw six executions,” said Maria DeLiberato, executive director of Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty.
“Now, when the Trump administration, whose attorney general is from Florida (referring to former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi), calls for increased use of the death penalty, Florida is executing people at an unprecedented rate,” DeLiberato said about this year’s schedule.
Many of the state’s conservative leaders laud DeSantis for carrying out a capital sentence, however.
In 2023, after he signed death warrants for Donald David Dillbeck and Louis Bernard Gaskin, then-Attorney General and now-U.S. Sen. Ashley Moody pointed to DeSantis at an event and said, “I have never been so proud to be a Floridian. A lot of it is due to this guy right here.”
Also, state Sen. Jonathan Martin, R-Fort Myers, has credited DeSantis with initiating and driving the push for expanding the death penalty, especially in cases involving child sex abuse. Martin sponsored the bill to make child rape a capital crime and thanked DeSantis for his leading the effort to get the Supreme Court to “reconsider” executing rapists.
“He’s standing between the child molesters and the wokeism (and our kids). We need to continue to support him and maybe, some day, he’ll have more of a decision on these federal judges,” Martin said.
U.S. presidents appoint federal judges. After the governor ended his run for the Republican presidential nomination last year, DeSantis fully embraced Trump’s agenda as a governing guide for Florida.
After Trump signed an executive order his first day in office directing U.S. attorneys to seek the death penalty for any conviction for which it is permitted, DeSantis responded with seven signed death warrants in three months.
A request for comment is pending with the governor’s press office.
DeSantis also proclaimed Florida the leader when it comes to immigration enforcement assistance to Trump’s drive for mass deportations, and he criticized Congress for lack of support of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to cut government spending – and started a Florida DOGE to streamline government.
Why?
“He’s focused on the presidency because, if he wants to stay in politics, that’s the only slot available for him since he doesn’t seem to be interested in the (U.S.) Senate,” said Charles Zelden, a professor of history and political science at Nova Southeastern University in Broward County.
In fact, Fox News recently placed DeSantis third in a ranking of potential 2028 GOP presidential candidates, behind Secretary of State Marco Rubio, until recently a U.S. senator from Florida, and Vice President J.D. Vance.
And Zelden sees DeSantis maneuvering to leverage the power he has as governor to position himself in a race for the nomination against two Washington-based competitors.
When he ran for president last year, a report by a death penalty watchdog group attributed a 25% increase in executions nationwide to Florida under DeSantis.
While a majority of registered Republican voters support the death penalty as a crime-fighting tool, overall public support for it is at a 50-year low. States like Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, and Ohio, all carried by Trump in November, have introduced bills to abolish it.
Florida has included child rape as a capital offense, in defiance of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling, and made it easier to impose a death sentence by repealing a unanimous jury requirement.
The governor must wait until inmates exhaust all appeals and the Board of Executive Clemency clears their case to sign a warrant for a death sentence to be imposed.
About 100 death row inmates, including seven added to the list this year, are eligible for execution.
DeSantis, who is term-limited, will leave office in 18 months and the Iowa and New Hampshire GOP primaries are a year after that.
“He’s running out of time,” Zelden said during a discussion of DeSantis, capital punishment and presidential politics. “He believes in the death penalty … and he’s trying to see that it gets carried out before he leaves.”
Nine states have executed people this year. Florida leads with five executions, followed by Texas with four and South Carolina with three, including one by firing squad, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
Florida next is scheduled to execute Anthony Wainwright on June 10 for the 1994 kidnapping, rape, and murder of a woman, and Thomas Lee Gudinas is set to die June 24 for another 1994 rape and murder.
DeLiberato said she believes everyday Floridians don’t support executing convicted murderers. She bases that on what she thinks is a telling anecdote:
Of the 12 executions carried out since 2023, dozens of capital punishment opponents have gathered outside the state prison in Raiford in silent protest, she said. But for only two of the executions, there’s been just a single person standing across the field in support.
James Call is a member of the USA TODAY NETWORK-Florida Capital Bureau. He can be reached at jcall@tallahassee.com and is on X as @CallTallahassee.
This article originally appeared on Tallahassee Democrat: Gov. DeSantis nears record as Florida ramps up executions in 2025
Reporting by James Call, USA TODAY NETWORK – Florida / Tallahassee Democrat
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