In a
small, piercingly bright room inside a state prison in northeast Florida,
Frank Walls was strapped to a gurney and injected three times: first with a
sedative meant to render him unconscious, then a paralytic to prevent any
visible movement, and finally potassium acetate to induce cardiac arrest, reported Mother Jones.
Walls’
execution on December 18, 2025, capped Florida’s deadliest year in modern
history. With 19 executions last year, Florida more than doubled its own
record, and put more people to death than Texas, Alabama, and South Carolina
combined. This execution spree came even as Florida’s lethal
injection protocol has come under scrutiny, prompting fears that those
executed are at risk of complications and needless suffering.
In his
final appeal, Walls asked Florida to review its three-step protocol, arguing
that the way the state’s been carrying out executions would violate his Eighth
Amendment right to be free of cruel and unusual punishment. His attorneys
documented allegations that even though men in the death chamber couldn’t
physically show the effects due to Florida’s three-drug protocol, some may have
suffered and died with the feeling of drowning. And an analysis of court
records, prison logs, redacted autopsy reports, and eyewitness testimonies
by Mother Jones found documented issues in half the executions last
year before Walls.
In at
least nine executions from February to September 2025, there were signs of
underdosings, the use of expired drugs, drug substitutions, or flaws in drug
logs maintained by the Florida Department of Corrections.
“Mr. Walls
will die a needlessly cruel death if Florida insists on trying to kill him with
Florida’s version of lethal injection,” wrote anesthesiologist Dr. Joel Zivot,
who met Walls at the Florida state prison five months before his execution, in
an affidavit Walls’ defense team submitted to the District Court in
Tallahassee.
Autopsy
results for Walls, who was sentenced to death for the 1987 killings of an Air
Force airman and his girlfriend, have not yet been released. But Zivot feared
the three-drug protocol could cause pulmonary edema, a condition that’s been
found in previous autopsies of people executed by Florida, and which Zivot said
causes “the terror that accompanies drowning and asphyxiation as they choke on
their own blood.”
The
Florida Attorney General’s office didn’t dispute Walls’ assertion that he could
experience the sensation of drowning and gasping for air after the second drug
is injected. They called it “irrelevant.”
The state
has been similarly unmoved by problems in recent executions.
In June
2025, logs included in a lawsuit showed that one man was executed with half of
the required amount of paralytic, and another man didn’t receive a full dose of
the drug meant to swiftly induce cardiac arrest.
The
Florida Department of Corrections’ own records indicated that the execution
team used expired sedatives in four deaths, raising concerns about the
effectiveness of the drugs and the risk of complications, including severe
pain. They also recorded the use of a local anaesthetic that’s not part of the
state’s execution protocol, and listed dates for use of the drugs that don’t
match execution dates.
Each of
these issues would violate Florida’s own protocol.
Rather than order an investigation, the state’s governor and past presidential
candidate, Republican Ron DeSantis, has already scheduled four executions this
year.
The death
penalty has waxed and waned in public opinion over the years, with botched
executions, racial disparities, and wrongful convictions under scrutiny in
recent years. Florida alone has seen at
least 30 exonerations from its death row.
But
reviving the federal death penalty is a key tenet of President Donald Trump’s
tough-on-crime agenda—and DeSantis has positioned Florida at the vanguard of
the Trump-led Republican Party. His own political future is unclear after his
failed presidential run, but he’s echoing loud and clear the president’s
enthusiasm for harsh and swift executions. Florida is leading the death
penalty’s resurgence.
“The exact
reasons as to why DeSantis has chosen to ramp things up now—I don’t think we
know,” said Hannah Gorman, who teaches death penalty law at Florida
International University’s College of Law.
But she
said the pace of Florida’s executions have ramifications nationally and
internationally. In 2025, executions in the United States nearly doubled, and
40 percent of them were in Florida alone.
“Florida
is an outlier in the U.S.,” said Gorman. “But this is also a massive message
coming out of America.”
DeSantis
has issued death warrants for 32 people since he took office in 2019, and 250
people remain on Florida’s
death row.
DeSantis’
office didn’t respond to a list of questions by Mother Jones. But in
November 2025, DeSantis said he was doing
his “part to deliver justice” to victims’ families by executing those
who have been on death row for decades. And the governor has unusually broad
power to enact this penalty: he both sets execution dates and proceeds over the
clemency hearings that could halt his own execution orders.
The last
review of lethal injection protocol by Department of Corrections Secretary
Ricky Dixon was in February 2025, after the year’s executions had already
begun. Dixon wrote in a letter to
Gov. DeSantis that his department’s lethal injection procedure was in line with
decency standards and “dignity of man.”
“The
foremost objective of the lethal injection process is a humane and dignified
death,” Dixon wrote. “The process will not involve unnecessary lingering or the
unnecessary or wanton infliction of pain and suffering.”
The
one-page letter didn’t explain what Dixon’s review entailed, and the Florida
Department of Corrections didn’t respond to questions about the review.
A month
after this letter was sent to Tallahassee, in March 2025, Florida executed
Edward James. Prison drug logs disclosed in court records show James was given
a local anesthetic—lidocaine—that’s not mentioned in the 14-page protocol
signed off by Dixon.
It’s
unclear why that drug was administered or who authorized it.
To Ron
McAndrew, a former Florida State Prison warden who led Florida’s executions
from 1996 to 1998 and oversaw three electric chair executions, Florida ought to
slow down and examine its protocol before executing anyone else.
“To put a
warden and a death team through 19 executions in one year was a horrible thing
for the Governor to do.”
Now an
anti-death penalty advocate, McAndrew’s concerns extend beyond procedure. He
worries about the toll on staff. The ones doing the “dirty work.”
McAndrew
has overseen and witnessed executions gone wrong. He was in charge in 1997,
when Pedro Medina’s head burst into flames on the electric chair. The former
warden said he wouldn’t wish that on anyone, especially prison staff.
“To put a
warden and a death team through 19 executions in one year was a horrible thing
for the Governor to do,” McAndrew said. “These are the people that are going to
wake up screaming in the middle of the night. These are the people that are
going to suffer for the rest of their lives because the people they have killed
are going to come visiting with them on a regular basis. They’re going to sit
on the edge of their bed at night and talk to them.”
In the
past, botched executions or deviations from established execution procedures
have prompted death penalty states to pause. Under Gov. Jeb Bush, Florida
prison officials botched a lethal injection in 2006, and Bush temporarily
halted executions. In Oklahoma, Republican Gov. Mary Fallin had to delay
executions twice, after the botched execution of Clayton Lockett in 2014 and
again after the revelation that the state substituted a new drug to stop
Charles Warner’s heart in 2015. Warner’s final
words, the Associated Press reported, were: “My body is on fire.” A grand
jury investigation found
“negligence” and serious errors in the state’s executions.
In 2022 in
Tennessee, Republican Gov. Bill Lee paused all
executions and sought an independent review of its execution protocol over
concerns about independent testing of the lethal drugs. When the review ended
in 2024, citing fewer opportunities for mistakes, Tennessee moved from a
three-drug protocol to a single drug, as at least 1o other states and the
federal system have now done.
Florida
has been using the same three-drug combination since 2017. Florida’s governor,
however, has yet to announce any investigation into this method or its recent
executions, let alone slow his pace in signing death warrants, despite repeated
pleas and public accounts.
In 2025
alone, media coverage described troubling scenes in at least three executions
in Florida. In April, Michael Tanzi’s chest heaved for about three minutes, the
Associated Press reported.
Tanzi was given the unauthorized sedative, lidocaine, prison logs later
showed.
During the
execution of Thomas Gudinas in June, media reported that
his eyes rolled back and his chest spasmed. Drug logs filed in court records
showed that Gudinas was injected with half the amount of paralytic required by
Florida’s protocol. Then in November, NBC
News reported that former Marine Bryan Jennings’ chest heaved and his
arms twitched. Jennings’ autopsy
report found that he experienced pulmonary edema—which mirrors the
feeling of drowning, and the condition a medical expert feared would happen to
Walls at his December execution.
After
Walls’ execution, a spokesperson for the governor’s office said there
were no complications with his three-step lethal injection. There were close to
30 witnesses in attendance, including relatives of Walls’ victims. The Pensacola
News Journal reported “about six minutes of labored breathing.”
And Maria
DeLiberato, Walls’ former attorney and the legal and policy director for
Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, said she saw Walls gasping
and his chest heaving: “Like he’s choking.” What she witnessed, she said,
didn’t match the state’s media briefing from the Raiford prison.
“I thought
something was wrong,” DeLiberato said.
In
January, Gov. DeSantis signed his first death warrant of this year for
Ronald Heath, who was convicted for the 1989 armed robbery and murder of a
traveling salesman near University of Florida. A jury sentenced him to death in
a 10–2 vote.
Unanimous
jury decisions were not required when Heath was convicted. They became law in
Florida after a landmark 2016 Supreme Court judgment, but in 2023, Gov.
DeSantis signed a
bill into law requiring only 8 of 12 jurors to vote for death.
Heath’s
final appeal urged the US Supreme Court to look into Florida’s three-step
lethal injection method, citing previous use of expired drugs, inconsistent
dosing and inaccurate logs about what happened in the death chamber. The state
argued that the Eighth Amendment prohibits cruel and unusual punishment, “not
inaccurate bookkeeping.”
The
Supreme Court denied Heath’s request, and Heath’s execution was quick and
without outward signs of complications, according to news coverage and a
witness. Two weeks later, as Melvin
Trotter’s execution date loomed for the murder of a grocery store
owner in 1986, he asked for a stay of execution based on the risk of a mangled
execution. Though the Supreme Court also rejected Trotter’s petition, this
time, Justice Sonia Sotomayor expressed her concern about Florida’s “troubling”
execution records.
Sotomayor
agreed with denying Trotter’s petition, but acknowledged that prisoners like
him are caught in a catch-22: Because they don’t have enough evidence of cruel
and unusual punishment, they have been denied the records they’d actually need
to prove it. “The very reason” they are seeking these documents, she noted in
a four-page
statement, is to prove their claims.
“By
continuing to shroud its executions in secrecy, Florida undermines both the
integrity of its own execution process and, potentially, this Court’s ability
to ensure the State’s compliance with its constitutional obligations,”
Sotomayor wrote.
As Trotter
was executed on February 24, he breathed heavily and his body twitched, PBS
News reported. Details about the drugs used in Trotter’s execution
won’t be revealed until the autopsy reports are made public.
DeSantis
has already ordered two more executions, Billy
Kearse on March 3 and Michael
King on March 17. And Sotomayor’s words are already reverberating on
the busy death row. Within a day of Sotomayor’s statement, her critique of
Florida’s secrecy had already been cited in a new appeal—and state officials
had already dismissed the justice’s concerns as “speculation.”
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