Last Friday, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed his seventh death warrant this year, breaking his record of six death warrants in 2023. The state has already killed five people this year.
Just a day earlier, DeSantis had signed two bills expanding Florida’s death penalty statute.
HB 903 allows the state to add additional execution methods to its protocol, which currently calls for execution by lethal injection or electrocution.
“It opens the door for the state to experiment with virtually any method not yet deemed unconstitutional—including beheading, electrocution, hanging, nitrogen hypoxia, firing squads, and other untested or future methods,” according to Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty Executive Director Maria DeLiberato.
HB 693 adds an aggravating factor for sentencing for capital felonies if “the victim of the capital felony was gathered with one or more persons for a school activity, religious activity, or public government meeting.”
Currently, the law requires a jury to find one aggravating factor to find a defendant eligible for the death penalty.
“The law requires the death penalty to be narrowly tailored and applied only in the most aggravated and least mitigated of first-degree murder cases. Adding aggravators, especially in our current non-unanimous system, continues to undermine the constitutionality of Florida’s entire capital defense scheme,” says DeLiberato.
HB 693 takes effect on October 1. HB 903 takes effect on July 1.