Florida is by far the state that leads this list, followed by Texas, Alabama, and South Carolina, with five deaths each. Florida authorities have made several decisions in recent years to facilitate the application of the death penalty. Among them is a law passed in 2023 that made the state the only one, along with Alabama, where a unanimous jury decision is not necessary to recommend the death penalty. Florida is also the state that requires the fewest jury votes to recommend a death sentence: eight out of twelve members are enough. This Thursday, Florida will extend its record of executions in a year to seventeen when it administers a lethal injection to Richard Barry Randolph, condemned in 1989 for the murder of a woman in East Palatka, in the northeast of the state. The execution of the 63-year-old Randolph is scheduled for 6:00 p.m. local time (22:00 GMT) at the Florida State Prison, near Starke, in the northern part of the state, and will be the 17th execution of the year and the seventh carried out on a veteran in 2025. Randolph was convicted of murder, armed robbery, and rape of a manager when he tried to rob the safe of a supply store where he had previously worked in Putnam County. The inmate's lawyers have tried to stop the execution, arguing that their client suffers from lupus, a condition that they say could constitute cruel punishment for the condemned due to the effects that the mixture of lethal injection drugs could have on him. Nevertheless, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected his arguments, ensuring that the claim 'is untimely'. In addition to the execution of Randolph, the state of Florida has two more scheduled before the end of the year. This would raise the number of executions in 2025 to 19, a historic record for Florida, which had not applied the death penalty to more than eight people in the same year since the Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976. To date, at least 43 people have been executed in the United States this year.
