Skip to main content

Florida to execute first prisoner of 2025 this week

James D. Ford
A man's fate hangs in the balance after decades on death row. The complexities of capital punishment in Florida are revealed.

James D. Ford spent nearly every moment of the last 25 years in a six-foot by nine-foot cell on Florida’s Death Row. From the moment a judge in Charlotte County in southwest Florida handed down his death sentence in 1999, Ford’s only option was to wait.

He waited as his lawyers unsuccessfully submitted appeal after appeal to Florida’s higher courts. He waited for rulings on motions meant to turn his death sentences into lifetime confinement. After his appeals lapsed and his sentence stood, he waited for his death warrant.

Gov. Ron DeSantis signed Ford’s execution order earlier this year and set his execution for Thursday. His attorneys have challenged long-standing federal and state precedents in attempts to avoid his death.

‘A gruesome discovery’


On a warm Monday in April, employees at the South Florida Sod Farm were searching the property’s 7,000 acres for Greg Malnory. Malnory, who had joined the staff a few months prior, went fishing on the farm with his wife and daughter a day earlier and hadn’t shown up to work Monday morning.

General manager Raymond Caruthers was called to a reservoir on the south side of the farm after lunch, he told lawyers in 1998. Three farm employees made what Judge Cynthia Ellis described as “a gruesome discovery”: Greg and Kim Malnory were found murdered next to Greg’s truck, and their toddler, Maranda, was strapped – alive – in a car seat inside.

The sentencing order said Greg Malnory, 25, had been shot in the head and beaten, and his throat had been slit. Kim Malnory, 26, had been beaten, sexually assaulted and shot with a rifle.

The couple’s daughter, Maranda, just shy of her second birthday, had been left alone for at least 18 hours. She was covered in her mother’s blood and mosquito bites. Ellis said Maranda’s survival could “only be the product of divine intervention.”

Living in Port Charlotte, and now 29, Maranda said she preferred not to discuss her parents’ murders.

“With everything going on, these two have been on my mind a lot lately,” she wrote last week on social media, with a photograph of her parents’ graves. “I make you proud every day, and I keep a picture of the three of us on my desk! I remind myself every day that I do it for you both. The last month has been the hardest; no one ever prepares you for it. As we get closer please be patient with me, I promise I’m not ignoring anyone I’m literally trying to survive.”

Police focused on Ford nearly immediately. He was the last person to see the Malnorys alive when he went fishing with them Sunday, and pieces of Ford’s rifle, ‘Old Betsy,’ were found scattered at the crime scene.

After 11 days of trial, a jury voted 11-1 to recommend a death sentence for Ford. Ellis agreed, sentencing Ford to death for the “heinous, atrocious and cruel” murders.

Florida’s death penalty since 1999 


The jury in Ford’s case recommended the death penalty for both murders, but the judge made the final sentencing decision. Stacy Biggart, a legal skills professor at the University of Florida, said judges had held the final verdict for decades.

Judges “almost always” followed the jury’s advisory verdict, but they were ultimately responsible for finding the aggravating factors that merited a death sentence, like prior violent felonies.

The 2016 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Hurst v. Florida upended the process, finding that the scheme violated defendants’ Sixth Amendment right to a trial by a jury.

“The ruling said that the jury has to find the facts necessary to impose the death penalty,” Biggart said. “The default sentence without aggravators is life. After Hurst, the jury had to find the aggravators.”

The Hurst decision prompted a “flurry of litigation” in death penalty cases around the state. Biggart joined Capital Collateral Regional Counsel, the office that represents death row inmates in post-conviction appeals, less than one month after the ruling.

“There were arguments that the death penalty was unconstitutional, that the ruling should be retroactive to all death penalty cases in Florida,” she said. “The Florida Supreme Court had to decide how to apply Hurst.”

The Florida Supreme Court made its decision in October 2016, requiring a unanimous death sentence and allowing certain death penalty cases to be reopened for litigation. The court only made its verdict retroactive to June 24, 2002, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled similarly in an Arizona case.

Ford’s death penalty case was finalized in May 2002 – less than one month before the court’s cutoff.

“It’s not fair,” Biggart said. “If it was unconstitutional on June 24, 2002, it was unconstitutional before then.”

The Florida Legislature passed a bill mandating unanimous death penalty verdicts in March 2017. The law was in place until 2023, months after a divided jury sentenced Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooter Nikolas Cruz to life.

“Society doesn’t like the fact that he got life,” Biggart said, “so we changed the law to make sure people like him could get what they deserve.”

The amended death penalty statute, which became law in April 2023, requires only eight of a jury’s 12 members to impose the death penalty. Florida and Alabama are the only states that allow a nonunanimous death penalty.

DeSantis signed a bill in 2023 that would allow the death penalty in sexual battery cases with a victim under 12 years old, despite U.S. Supreme Court rulings that the death penalty cannot be imposed in cases where the victim didn’t die.

Additionally, the Florida Legislature’s recent immigration bill, known as the TRUMP Act, would require the death penalty for an “unauthorized alien” who commits a capital crime. The U.S. Supreme Court has also ruled that mandatory death sentences are unconstitutional.

Recent Florida death penalty laws are unconstitutional, Biggart said, which may be part of the reason they are passed.

“If these laws are passed and challenged, courts might revisit death penalty laws,” she said. “Florida citizens seem to like the death penalty. I think the death penalty in Florida is going to thrive.”

Ford’s final appeals 


The last weeks of Ford’s 20 years of appeals have seen petitions from outside organizations and motions from his lawyers urging a stay in his execution.

Maria DeLiberato, the executive director of Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, said the state has the opportunity to “bring justice without causing more violence” in Ford’s case.

“Like many people on death row, he didn’t get a death sentence with a happy, healthy childhood,” she said. “Mercy is always appropriate, especially for someone who lives a peaceful life and has family who cares for him.”

In motions submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court on Sunday, Ford’s lawyers, Ali Shakoor and Adrienne Shepherd, argued that the 2005 decision in Roper v. Simmons justified pausing his execution.

His lawyers did not respond to emails or phone messages for a week. Gerod Hooper, the chief assistant at Capital Collateral Regional Counsel-Middle, said the basis of the appeal was Ford’s mental age.

He said the U.S. Supreme Court prohibited executions for people who are mentally or chronologically under 18 but only for conditions that “prevent the brain from developing.”

“Mr. Ford … is mentally around 12 years old, but because his deficiency didn’t happen until after he was 18, he can get executed,” Hooper said. “Our position is that (it) is illogical. Mental deficiency should be applicable if it existed at the time of the crime.”

The U.S. Supreme Court has the final say on Ford’s execution. He is set to be executed Thursday evening.

Source: floridapolitics.com, Bea Lunardini, February 13, 2025

_____________________________________________________________________








"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted."

— Oscar Wilde



Most viewed (Last 7 days)

Louisiana | Execution by nitrogen gas ‘ugly way to die’: MD

What is it like to be executed by nitrogen gas? Dr. Jonathan Groner, a medical ethicist who studies capital punishment, has not witnessed an execution using this method, but he speculates about what happens to an inmate who is given pure nitrogen to inhale through a mask.   “They don’t go quietly, I will say that,” Groner, a professor of surgery at The Ohio State University College of Medicine, told “Banfield” on Wednesday. A federal judge this week halted the state of Louisiana’s plans to execute an inmate for the first time through “nitrogen hypoxia.” State officials plan to appeal the judge’s decision, which raised questions about whether using nitrogen gas is a cruel and unusual punishment.

America’s next killing spree: 10 days, five states, six death-row prisoners set to die

Desolate spectacle of executions begins again under Trump, in landscape of capital punishment as riven as US is as a whole David Leonard Wood. Jessie Hoffman. Aaron Gunches. Wendell Grissom. Edward Thomas James. Moises Sandoval Mendoza. So many names. So many dead men walking. Ten days, five states, six death row prisoners scheduled for execution. For a decade now, capital punishment in the US has been on the wane. Last year, for the 10th year running, there were fewer than 30 executions in America, and the number of new death sentences is also tracking at historic lows.

Violent and sudden. What a firing squad execution looked like through my eyes

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — I’ve now watched through glass and bars as 11 men were put to death at a South Carolina prison. None of the previous 10 prepared me for watching the firing squad death of Brad Sigmon on Friday night. I might now be unique among U.S. reporters: I’ve witnessed three different methods — nine lethal injections and an electric chair execution. I can still hear the thunk of the breaker falling 21 years later. As a journalist you want to ready yourself for an assignment. You research a case. You read about the subject.

Texas | Court stays execution of Texas man days before he was set to die by lethal injection

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — A Texas appeals court on Tuesday halted the execution of a man who has spent more than 30 years on death row and had been set to die by lethal injection this week over the killings of six girls and young women found buried in the desert near El Paso. It was the second scheduled execution in the U.S. halted on Tuesday after a federal judge stopped Louisiana’s first death row execution using nitrogen gas, which was to take place next week. In Texas, the order was another reprieve for David Leonard Wood, who in 2009 was about 24 hours away from execution when it was halted over claims he is intellectually disabled and thus ineligible for execution.

South Carolina plans to carry out a firing squad execution. Is it safe for witnesses?

South Carolina plans to execute a man by firing squad on March 7, the first such execution in the state and the first in the nation in 15 years. But firearms experts are questioning whether South Carolina's indoor execution setup is safe for the workers who will shoot the prisoner and the people who will watch. Photos released by the South Carolina Department of Corrections show that the state intends to strap the prisoner, Brad Sigmon, to a metal seat in the same small, indoor brick death chamber where South Carolina has executed more than 40 other prisoners by electric chair and lethal injection since 1985.

South Carolina Executes Brad Sigmond

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — A South Carolina man who killed his ex-girlfriend’s parents with a baseball bat was executed by firing squad Friday, the first U.S. prisoner in 15 years to die by that method, which he saw as preferable to the electric chair or lethal injection. Three volunteer prison employees used rifles to carry out the execution of Brad Sigmon, 67, who was pronounced dead at 6:08 p.m. Sigmon killed David and Gladys Larke in their Greenville County home in 2001 in a botched plot to kidnap their daughter. He told police he planned to take her for a romantic weekend, then kill her and himself.

Texas Death Row chef who cook for hundreds of inmates explained why he refused to serve one last meal

Brian Price would earn the title after 11 years cooking for the condemned In the unlikely scenario that you ever find yourself on Death Row, approaching your final days as a condemned man, what would you request for your final meal? Would you push the boat out and request a full steal dinner or play it safe and opt for a classic dish such as pizza or a burger? For most of us it's something that we'll never have to think about, but for one man who spent over a decade working as a 'Death Row chef' encountering prisoner's final requests wasn't anything out of the ordinary.

Indonesia | Briton faces death penalty for trafficking a kilogram of ecstasy in Bali

A British man is facing the death penalty for allegedly dealing a kilo of MDMA in Bali. Thomas Parker was seen for the first time since his January arrest on Thursday, paraded in front of media in an orange jumpsuit in Denpasar. The 32-year-old could face a firing squad if he is found guilty of trying to push the 1.055kg of Class A drugs police say they recovered in a mail package. MDMA is the main component in the party drug ecstasy. Parker was arrested outside an Airbnb in January, but the case went unreported until authorities showed the Brit shaven and handcuffed at a press conference yesterday.

Todd Willingham: Ex-wife says convicted killer confessed

The former wife of a man whose 2004 execution in Texas has become a source of controversy has said he admitted setting the fire that killed their three daughters during a final prison meeting just weeks before he was put to death, according to a Texas newspaper. Stacy Kuykendall, the ex-wife of Cameron Todd Willingham, said in a statement to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram published Sunday that Willingham told her he was upset by threats to divorce him after the new year. The fire that killed the couple's three girls was Dec. 23, 1991. Her last threat to divorce him, she said in a statement, occurred the night before the fire. "He said if I didn't have my girls I couldn't leave him and that I could never have Amber or the twins with anyone else but him," according to the statement from Kuykendall to the newspaper. Willingham went to his death proclaiming his innocence. And over the years, she has offered differing accounts. A Tribune investigation in 2004 showed the...

Iranian dissident risked execution by secretly filming luxurious lifestyle of those connected to the regime

Iranians in Tehran illicitly filmed scenes of their capital for Israeli Channel 12 news, an act that constitutes espionage in Iran and can warrant a death penalty. The clips, broadcast on Saturday, showed locals at high-end shopping malls that the videographers said are only financially accessible to those connected to the regime. “I filmed this video with great difficulty and fear, and I said I would send it to the Israeli Channel 12,” said a 44-year-old Iranian who sent footage for the report and went by the alias Ali, speaking in Persian. “I committed a dangerous act. If you just talk to Israelis, you become a spy and they will execute you.”