Florida | DeSantis signs death warrant for eighth execution of the year

Michael Bell, 54, is scheduled to die by lethal injection July 15 for the mistaken-revenge killing of two people outside of Jacksonville bar in 1993.

Michael Bernard Bell, who was convicted for the 1993 murder of a man and woman in Jacksonville, has been scheduled for execution under the eighth death warrant signed this year by Gov. Ron DeSantis.

Bell, 54, is set to die by lethal injection July 15 at Florida State Prison near the city of Starke, according to the warrant, signed Friday.

He was found guilty in 1995 and sentenced to death for the murders of Jimmy West and Tamecka Smith.

Bell was seeking revenge for the death of his brother, who had been killed by West’s half-brother earlier in 1993, according to court records.

In December 1993, Bell spotted what he thought was the car of the man who fatally shot his brother, according to court records. Bell was apparently unaware that West bought the car from his brother's killer.

Bell called on two friends and armed himself with an AK-47 rifle, authorities said. They found the car parked outside a liquor lounge and waited. When West, Smith and another woman eventually exited the club, Bell approached the car and opened fire, officials said.

West died at the scene, and Smith died on the way to the hospital. The other woman escaped injury. Witnesses said Bell also fired at a crowd of onlookers before fleeing the area. He was arrested the next year.

Bell was also serving three 25-year sentences for three unrelated murders, records show. He fatally shot a woman and her toddler son in 1989, and he killed his mother's boyfriend about four months before the attack on West and Smith, officials said.

If the state puts Bell and Gudinas to death, it would match Florida's most executions in a year since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976 after a U.S. Supreme Court decision had halted it.

Six other executions have taken place in Florida this year, with Thomas Gudinas' scheduled for June 24, all by lethal injection.

Friday’s death warrant came three days after the state executed Anthony Wainwright, who was convicted of kidnapping a woman in 1994 from a supermarket parking lot in Lake City and raping and murdering her in rural Hamilton County.

Florida also executed eight inmates in 1984 and 2014, a Florida Department of Corrections list shows.

Source: The Associated Press, Staff, June 14, 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

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