Florida is on track this year to break its own record with 20 executions, leading all states by far in carrying out the death penalty. The state accounted for about 40% of all executions nationwide last year.
Opponents of the death penalty say the Florida governor has more authority than other states' top officials in approving death warrants.
The Florida Supreme Court's ruling in 2023 — not requiring a unanimous jury decision in capital punishment cases — may also be driving the high number of those on death row.
Speaking to reporters last November, Gov. Ron DeSantis defended his record, saying that families of victims are waiting too long for justice.
" I think what happened was, you know, we've heard from a lot of the family members of the victims over the years, and if you think about it, some of these crimes were committed in the '80s," he said. "There's a saying, 'justice delayed is justice denied,' and so I was really… I felt that I owed it to them to make sure that this ran very smoothly and promptly."
The Death Penalty Information Center reports that the death penalty is legal in 27 states in the U.S., with execution warrants issued by state courts or judges. Only in Florida and Pennsylvania does the authority to sign death warrants lay in the hands of the governor. Pennsylvania, however, has had a moratorium on executions for the past decade and has not carried out capital punishments in over 20 years.
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Florida's high number of executions is part of a global trend, reports Amnesty International. The human rights group reported a 78% increase in executions globally from 2024 to 2025. The government in Iran, for example, carried out more than 2,000 executions last year. The authoritarian regime uses the death penalty to instill fear and punish dissent.
Justin Mazzola, a researcher with Amnesty International U.S.A., attributed Florida's record pace of executions with its Republican governor.
" The U.S.'s rise is solely due to what was happening in Florida this past year and the extraordinary lengths that the DeSantis administration went to carry out executions on basically a spree," Mazzola told WLRN.
DeSantis has said the death penalty is a deterrent to crime and views it as "an appropriate punishment for the worst offenders."
Mazzola said DeSantis and other death penalty advocates are wrong about capital punishment being a crime deterrent.
" A lot of it is tied to the flawed rhetoric around security that the death penalty makes us safer and Governor DeSantis using this as a kind of badge for any prospects that he may have potentially once his term is ended," Mazzola said.
Craig Trocino, director of the Miami Law Innocence Clinic which is dedicated to identifying and correcting wrongful convictions, argues that Florida's high number of exonerations of those on death row should be a cautionary sign for DeSantis and that the death penalty should be abolished. Twenty-three states and the District of Columbia prohibit the practice.
Florida had 30 exonerations from death row as of 2025 — more than any other state — according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
" You would think if you led the nation in exonerations from death row, you would do the opposite of speed them up," he said "You would stop them, try and figure out why that's happening and then instead of doing that, we're increasing the availability of [the] death penalty."
Juries and the death penalty
Before 2016, Florida would allow a simple majority of 7 out of 12 jurors to recommend the death penalty. In the 2016 case of Hurst v. Florida, The U.S. Supreme Court struck down this system and the Florida Supreme Court changed the rule to require unanimous jury recommendation.
The Florida Supreme Court then reversed this prior ruling and by 2023 the legislature rescinded the unanimity requirement and today only 8 of 12 jurors need to recommend the death sentence for it to be imposed.
Florida and Alabama are the only execution states that don't require a unanimous jury to hand down a death sentence. In 2025, Florida had almost 300 people on death row and was preceded only by California, which had over 500 people on death row but last executed someone in 2006.
Trocino said Billy Kearse — the third man executed in Florida this year — is an example of a death row prisoner who should have been sentenced to life in prison considering he committed his crime at the age of 18. He was 53 when he was executed.
"You never wanna hear his name again? Sentence him to life in prison without the possibility of parole and the next time you hear his name probably, maybe, is if he dies in prison of some other reason," Trocino said. "The boy they sentenced to death row was not the man they executed."
Kearse was sentenced to death in 1991 for the fatal shooting of a Fort Pierce police officer, Danny Parrish.
Following the execution, Parrish's widow, Mirtha Busbin, told reporters she found peace in seeing her husband's killer punished.
"It's been a long, long 35 years," said Busbin. "We didn't win anything though; we lost another life, but we did get justice."
DeSantis and the death penalty
DeSantis's second term as governor ends in January 2027. Between 2019 and 2024, he signed nine death warrants. He signed 19 in 2025, and has signed 10 so far in 2026.
" I think we're in a good spot now," DeSantis told reporters last November. "I wanna make sure that people that have exhausted all these appeals over many years — sometimes decades like when all that's done and they're there, and there's victims' families that are wanting to see justice, then I'm doing my part to deliver that."
The Governor's office did not directly respond to WLRN's request for clarification on what guided the governor's hand in signing 19 death warrants last year but communications director Alex Lanfranconi said this: "My advice to those who are seeking to avoid the death penalty in Florida would be to not murder people."
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