Florida authorities executed Billy Leon Kearse on Tuesday, who was convicted of killing a police officer. This marks the third execution in the state in 2026, a year after Florida broke its record with 19 executions. The 53-year-old Kearse received a lethal injection at Florida State Prison in northern Florida at 6:24 p.m. local time (11:24 p.m. GMT), the Florida Department of Corrections reported. The inmate had been on death row since 1991, when a court convicted him of killing a police officer with his own service weapon after being arrested for driving the wrong way on the road. Kearse lacked a valid driver's license, and after a struggle, he seized the officer's gun and shot him fourteen times. Although the Florida Supreme Court ordered a new sentence, understanding that the jury did not have all the necessary information during its first verdict, the man was again sentenced to death in 1997. Before Kearse, Florida authorities had already executed two other inmates this year and have scheduled two more executions for this month. On the 17th, the death penalty will be applied to Michael King for the kidnapping, rape, and murder of a woman in 2008, and on the 31st, former police officer James Duckett will be executed, convicted of the rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl in 1987. The state broke its annual record last year with 19 executions, which accounted for two out of every five of the 47 death penalty procedures in the entire United States last year, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976 in the United States, Florida's annual maximum had been eight executions, reached in 1984 and 2014.
