Death penalty opponents have decried an unprecedented surge in executions ordered by Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, after the state maintained a record pace with last week’s killing of a military veteran.
Norman Mearle Grim, who was convicted of the 1998 murder and rape of a neighbor, became the 15th person put to death this year, by lethal injection, at Florida State Prison in Starke on Wednesday.
With two active death warrants also signed by DeSantis for prisoners on death row, and their executions scheduled before the end of November, Florida will have shattered its previous record of eight in a calendar year since the supreme court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, set in 1984 and 2014.
“This is what happens when a government loses its conscience. When mercy is replaced with machinery. When killing becomes routine and our leaders tout the body count as an achievement,” a statement from the advocacy group Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty said in part after officials confirmed Grim’s death.
DeSantis has offered no public reason for the exponential upswing in executions, and his office did not respond to an inquiry by the Guardian.
But groups opposed to the death penalty see only one explanation: the political ambitions of the lame-duck governor, who will be termed out of office in January 2027 and has, many believe, his sights set on succeeding Donald Trump in the White House.
It’s a formula they say they have seen from him before, most recently in 2023, when he announced his ultimately ill-fated run for his party’s presidential nomination and ordered six executions, after none had taken place in the state during the previous three years.
In 2024, after DeSantis’s candidacy flopped, only one execution took place.
“It’s disgusting and disgraceful. The only logical or plain explanation is that Governor DeSantis is planning on running for the 2028 nomination,” said Justin Mazzola, deputy director of research at Amnesty International US.
“In 2023 he starts running for president and all of a sudden we see a huge jump, and it seems he’s using the same playbook, basically showing that he’s tough on crime. It just shows how insecure and small he is as a person. He’s nothing more than a bully, just like Trump is. To them, this is the way to demonstrate their power, carrying out these executions.”
Figures from the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC) show that there have been 41 executions so far this year in the US, with Texas having the next highest number after Florida, which has five. With five more scheduled nationwide before the end of the year, two of them in Florida, it means that DeSantis will have accounted for almost 40% of the nation’s total.
“One of the most troubling things is the secrecy about why we are seeing this incredibly high number of executions,” said Robin Maher, executive director of the DPIC.
“We have absolutely no explanation from Governor DeSantis, and he alone has the authority to select people for execution and set those execution dates. Floridians, the people that elected this man, are in the complete dark about why the state is investing so much money and energy into executing prisoners this year instead of investing in other things that the population might be in greater need of.
“People expect their elected officials to be transparent and to be accountable for those decisions. We have neither in this case.”
Maher said Florida’s accelerated pace had exerted pressure on the legal system and affected the mental health of those caught up in the whirlwind.
“We have been talking a lot about the collateral consequences of the death penalty and how it affects communities and families and so many others beyond just the prisoner who is being executed,” she said.
“The defenders are under enormous strain. In Florida, there have been executions set roughly every two weeks for the entire year, and that has put enormous pressure on the defenders to try to save their clients’ lives, and they are doing so, you know, with tremendous workloads, without sufficient resources, and under extremely short timeframes that no other professional should be expected to operate and perform in.”
Of note, she added, was that five of the 15 people executed in Florida this year were military veterans.
“That’s quite astonishing considering Governor DeSantis is also a military veteran and has said Florida is one of the most veteran-friendly states in the country,” she said.
Overall, the number of executions has declined significantly across the country since 2000, when 85 took place, almost half of them in Texas. That drop, to only 11 in 2021, makes Florida an outlier, analysts say.
Craig Trocino, director of Miami Law’s Innocence Clinic at the University of Miami, said legislation in Florida has undergone several changes in recent years, most prominently a 2023 law that reduced the requirement for a death penalty from a unanimous jury verdict in favor to an eight-juror majority.
DeSantis pushed for the legislation after the life of Nikolas Cruz, convicted of the 2018 shooting at Parkland’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school that killed 17 students and staff, was spared by three holdouts on the jury of 12.
“The Florida legislature, backed by the governor, has attempted to do anything that they can to make death sentences easier to obtain,” Trocino said. “If the death penalty is going to exist, and I don’t think it should, then the rule of the day should not be expedience, it should be deliberation.
“Florida leads the nation in people who were exonerated from death row – the last count is 30. So when you have a history of getting it wrong, the last thing you should be doing is speeding it up.”
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