Florida completes its seventh execution in 2025

As reported in this AP article, a “man convicted of raping and killing a woman near a central Florida bar was executed Tuesday evening. Thomas Lee Gudinas, 51, was pronounced dead at 6:13 p.m. after receiving a lethal injection at Florida State Prison near Starke, said Bryan Griffin, a spokesman for Gov. Ron DeSantis.” Here is more:

Gudinas was convicted in the May 1994 killing of Michelle McGrath…. Gudinas was the seventh person put to death in Florida this year, with an eighth scheduled for next month. The state also executed six people in 2023, but only carried out one execution last year.

A total of 24 men have been put to death in the U.S. this year, with scheduled executions set to make 2025 the year with the most executions since 2015. Florida has executed more people than any other state this year, while Texas and South Carolina are tied for second place with four each. Alabama has executed three people, Oklahoma two, and Arizona, Indiana, Louisiana and Tennessee each have one. Mississippi is set to join the other states on Wednesday with its first execution since 2022….

McGrath was last seen at a bar called Barbarella’s shortly before 3 a.m. on May 24, 1994. Her body, showing evidence of serious trauma and sexual assault, was found several hours later in an alley next to a nearby school.

Gudinas had been at the same bar with friends the night before, but they all later testified that they had left without him. A school employee who found McGrath’s body later identified Gudinas as a man who was fleeing the area shortly beforehand. Another woman also identified Gudinas as the person who chased her to her car the previous night and threatened to assault her.

Gudinas was convicted and sentenced to death in 1995. Attorneys for Gudinas filed appeals with the Florida Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court but they were rejected. The lawyers had argued in their state filing that evidence related to “lifelong mental illnesses” exempts Gudinas from being put to death. The Florida Supreme Court denied the appeals last week, ruling that the case law that shields intellectually disabled people from execution does not apply to individuals with other forms of mental illness or brain damage.

Separately, a federal filing argued that the Florida governor’s unfettered discretion to sign death warrants violates death row inmates’ constitutional rights to due process and has led to an arbitrary process for determining who lives and who dies. The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday denied Gudinas’ request for a stay of execution.

I believe Florida has never executed more than eight murderers in any calendar year, so it would appear the state could be on pace for a record year.   But I doubt any state will get anywhere close to the pace Texas set decades ago. In the late 1990s, Texas averaged over 30 executions per year, and in 2000 the state executed 40 murderers.  It has been more than a dozen years since the entire United States had more than 40 executions in one calendar year.