Florida Carries Out 19th Execution Of The Year

Florida carried out its 19th execution of the year on Thursday night, the highest number of state-sanctioned killings by a single state in the U.S. in more than 15 years.

Florida executed 58-year-old Frank Walls by lethal injection as punishment for the 1987 killings of Edward Alger and his girlfriend Ann Peterson when Walls was 19 years old. He later confessed to three additional killings.

Walls’ death marked the 47th execution of 2025 — nearly twice the number of executions from the previous year. (An additional execution scheduled for Wednesday in Georgia was suspended amid conflict-of-interest revelations in the case.) A small number of outlier states drove the surge. Florida, alone, accounted for 40% of all executions in the country this year. Texas is the only other state that has ever executed more than 18 people in a single year, most recently in 2009, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

Autopsies of those executed by lethal injection indicate that the process may cause the lungs to fill with fluid, creating the sensation of suffocating or drowning to death, NPR previously reported. Ahead of his execution, Walls asked the Supreme Court to halt the killing, arguing that his intellectual disability made him ineligible for execution and that execution logs from the Florida Department of Corrections showed the state’s execution practices were error-prone.

The logs “revealed a wide range of errors such as habitual inaccuracies in documenting when drugs are removed from storage, indicating that their records are inaccurate and being filled out after executions take place, the removal and/or preparation of the wrong quantity of certain drugs before past executions, documented improvisation and usage of drugs not itemized in the protocol, and even documented use of expired etomidate during past executions,” Walls’ lawyers wrote in a court filing.

The Supreme Court denied Walls’ request, as it has done with every single request to stay an execution this year.

The breakneck pace of Florida’s executions makes botched killings more likely, Ron McAndrew, a former Florida state prison warden, wrote in the Tampa Bay Times on Wednesday.

“What the legal briefs do not fully capture is how easily such failures can occur when executions are scheduled back-to-back,” wrote McAndrew, who has overseen three executions. “Executions are not automated. They require correctional officers, supervisors, and medical personnel to prepare drugs, verify records, monitor consciousness, and respond if something goes wrong. When warrants pile up, staff have less time to review procedures, double-check documentation, or recover from the last execution before being asked to carry out the next one.”

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) has pushed the state to increase the pace of killings and make it easier to secure additional death sentences. At his direction, state lawmakers have passed legislation making child sex abuse and sex trafficking capital offenses. DeSantis has indicated he wants to challenge a 2008 Supreme Court case that held that the death penalty for rape would violate constitutional protections against cruel and unusual punishment.

Florida is also one of just two states that allow non-unanimous juries to impose death sentences. Nearly one-third of all new death sentences this year were the result of non-unanimous jury verdicts, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.