Death Penalty News

HOLMES COUNTY, Fla. (WMBB) – In just three minutes, Johnny Mack “Sketo” Calhoun was sentenced to death for a second time Friday morning. “It is the order of this court that Johnny Sketo Mack Calhoun be sentenced to death in a manner prescribed by the state of Florida for the first-degree murder of Mia Chay Brown,” said Chief Judge Christopher Patterson. After the eight-day resentencing hearing in April, a jury recommended that Calhoun receive the death penalty for the 2010 murder of Mia Chay Brown.

A Miami-Dade judge sentenced Rafael Andres, a 61-year-old Cuban, to death this Friday for the murder of Ivette Fariñas, a 31-year-old waitress, also Cuban, who worked at the La Carreta restaurant at Miami International Airport, a crime committed two decades ago. According to Telemundo 51, Judge Zachary James of the Miami-Dade Circuit Court followed the jury's recommendation, which voted 9 to 3 in favor of the death penalty last November after reviewing all the evidence in the case. The jury classified the crime as "atrocious, horrifying, or cruel," although they did not conclude that it was committed in a cold, calculated, and premeditated manner.

A Broward County man is scheduled to die by lethal injection on Thursday evening while his legal team mounts a furious, multi-pronged effort to halt the execution in federal and state courts. Richard Knight, who was convicted of the 2000 murders of Odessia Stephens and her daughter, Hanessia Mullings, faces a May 21 execution date at 6:00 p.m. ET. If carried out, it will mark the seventh execution in Florida this year and the 34th under Governor Ron DeSantis.

After about 4 hours of deliberations, jurors on Friday recommended Harrel Braddy should be sentenced to life in prison for the 1998 killing of 5-year-old Quantisha Maycock.  A South Florida man who dropped off a 5-year-old child in the Everglades to be eaten alive by gators nearly 3 decades ago was given a second chance at life as jurors recommended he should spend the rest of his life behind bars instead of being sent to death row. After about four hours of deliberations, jurors on Friday recommended Harrel Braddy should be sentenced to life in prison for the 1998 killing of 5-year-old Quantisha Maycock. 

The mother of a 5-year-old girl who was thrown into the Everglades and left to be attacked by alligators spoke about the trauma she and her daughter went through.  On Tuesday, prosecutors asked the jury to send the girl's killer back to Florida's death row.  Prosecutor Abbe Rifkin told the jury that Quatisha Maycock, known as "Candy," was excited to start kindergarten, showing them a photo of her smiling.  About a month after school started, Harrel Braddy took Quatisha to a remote part of Alligator Alley, the stretch of I-75 cutting through Florida's Everglades, where he knew she would vanish. 

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. -- A man convicted of killing a traveling salesman during a robbery is set to become Florida's first execution of 2026 under a death warrant signed Friday by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, who signed off on a record 19 executions last year. Ronald Palmer Heath, 64, is scheduled to die by lethal injection Feb. 10 at Florida State Prison. DeSantis oversaw more executions in a single year in 2025 than any other Florida governor since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976. The previous record was set in 2014 with eight executions.

TALLAHASSEE — A new state law lowering the number of jurors required to recommend death sentences has spurred a rash of litigation, triggered conflicting judicial rulings and infused an additional level of uncertainty in capital cases. The changes have caused what numerous attorneys called “chaos” in the death-penalty system. The law allows death sentences to be imposed based on the recommendations of eight of 12 jurors, an easier threshold than a previous requirement of unanimous jury recommendations. The change — prompted by Parkland school shooter Nikolas Cruz receiving a life sentence after a jury did not unanimously recommend death — gave Florida the lowest death-penalty jury standard in the nation.

I recently had the privilege of meeting Herman Lindsey, who was wrongfully convicted in 2006 and sentenced to death in 2007 for crimes he did not commit. He now lives in Broward County and serves on the board of Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty. I was a member of the Florida Supreme Court in 2009 when the court unanimously held that there was insufficient evidence to uphold Herman’s conviction. That decision ultimately led to his release, but only after he spent 18 months on death row. Herman was sentenced to death after a jury voted to recommend the death sentence by a vote of 8-4. That is the same vote that is required under Florida’s new capital sentencing law that Gov. Ron DeSantis approved and signed into law on April 20, replacing Florida’s requirement of a unanimous death recommendation.

Duane Owen is scheduled to be executed in Florida on June 15, 2023. If it occurs, his execution will be the fourth execution in Florida this year, after a three year pause in executions due to the COVID-19 pandemic.  Mr. Owen was convicted in 1986 of crimes that occurred in 1984. Mr. Owen’s attorneys have presented evidence that he is incompetent to be executed. They argued it was error for the Florida courts to find that “the psychiatrists that only briefly examined Owen were more credible than the neuropsychologist who spent over 13 hours with Owen conducting interviews and testing.” 

The State of Florida is scheduled to execute Donald Dillbeck on 23 February 2023. Now aged 60, he was sentenced to death in 1991 after only eight jurors voted for the death penalty under a law since found unconstitutional. His lawyers are seeking recognition that his neurobehavioral disorder is akin to intellectual disability and should exempt him from execution under constitutional law. They also maintain that the prosecution’s use of his prior conviction for murder to support the death penalty is undermined by new evidence that reveals more mitigating than aggravating factors than the original jury heard in this regard. 

At the urging of Governor Ron DeSantis, bills have been introduced in the Florida House and Senate that would allow death sentences even when the jury cannot come to a unanimous verdict on the proper penalty. The proposed legislation would also permit a presiding judge to override a jury’s recommendation of life and impose a death sentence. Death sentences would be allowed if at least eight jurors agreed, creating the lowest threshold in the nation for the imposition of a death sentence. Only Alabama currently allows death sentences when the jury is not unanimous, and it requires at least 10 jurors to agree on death.

A judge in Birmingham, Alabama, has been suspended with pay after the Alabama Judicial Inquiry Commission alleged that she showed an apparent predisposition against the death penalty, ignored appellate directives, and showed a lack of appropriate demeanor to prosecutors. Judge Tracie Todd’s legal errors are part of a continuing pattern with the capacity to harm public confidence in the judicial process, particularly with regards to death penalty issues, according to the commission’s April 6 complaint . AL.com has coverage . The ethics complaint alleges abuse of judicial power and “abandonment of the judicial role of detachment and neutrality.” The allegations concern mostly incidents from 2014 through 2018 in matters involving the death penalty, prosecutors and personal vindication of her prior rulings and actions, the complaint says. “This complaint is about a judge who continued to fail to respect and follow clear directives and rulings of the appellate courts,” the complaint says. T...

In 2 long-awaited decisions that will alter the landscape of Florida’s death row, the Florida Supreme Court has limited the reach of a landmark ruling that overturned the state’s constitutional prohibition against death sentences imposed after a non-unanimous jury vote for death. The court’s January 2020 decision in State v. Poole had raised the specter that the court might rescind orders that had overturned the death sentences of more than 100 Florida death-row prisoners and granted them new sentencing trials. However, on November 25, the court decided the cases of 2 defendants sentenced to death by non-unanimous juries who had been awaiting resentencing under the court’s 2016 decision, Hurst v. State . In those cases, the court unanimously rebuffed state prosecutors’ efforts to reinstate the death sentences of Bessman Okafor and Michael James Jackson without affording them the capital resentencing hearings previously ordered by the court. In January 2020, after state trial and appel...

The Florida Supreme Court has ruled it cannot reinstate death sentences for 2 convicted killers who previously had those sentences vacated by the justices. The Florida Supreme Court ruled Wednesday it cannot reinstate death sentences for 2 convicted killers who previously had those sentences vacated by the justices in a ruling that could ultimately affect dozens of cases. Instead, the justices determined that new sentencing hearings must be held for this pair of inmates. They are among more than 100 murderers who had death sentences vacated over the issue of whether juries had to unanimously recommend capital punishment. “We realize that resentencing in a capital case is time-consuming and costly, all at the public’s expense. These considerations, however compelling, do not give us license to exceed the legal constraints on our authority,” the court ruled in one of the cases. The decisions are the latest twist in the Florida Supreme Court's effort to decide whether juries must unan...

Final preparations are underway for the execution of Harold Wayne Nichols, who was convicted in Hamilton County Criminal Court of the rape and murder of Karen Pulley in 1988. The execution is currently set for 7 p.m. on Aug. 4. The Tennessee Department of Correction (TDOC) is now accepting applications from recognized Tennessee news organizations to serve as statutorily required witnesses for the scheduled execution. 7 media witnesses and 2 alternates will be selected by the Tennessee Department of Correction during a drawing to be held at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville. The drawing will take place on Friday, July 17, at 9 a.m. (CST). Nichols is now 59 and has long been on death row. The Tennessee Court of Appeals last October ruled that Nichols, who was also convicted of the rape and assault of several other women, would remain on death row. Nichols had appealed a decision of Judge Don Ash, who dismissed his post-conviction appeal. ...

The Nebraska Supreme Court on Friday rejected death row inmate Jeffrey Hessler's constitutional challenge to his conviction based on a 2016 ruling by the country's highest court. Hessler asked to be taken off death row because a e-judge panel and not a jury sentenced him to death for raping and killing 15-year-old Heather Guerrero after he abducted her while she delivered newspapers. His motion cited the U.S. Supreme Court's 2016 decision in Hurst v. Florida , which struck down part of that state’s system because jurors didn’t play a great enough role in determining whether defendants were sentenced to die. In Florida, a jury had considered evidence before making a recommendation on whether the death penalty was appropriate, but the decision ultimately fell to a judge. In January 2016, the court found that sentencing scheme violated the Sixth Amendment. Nebraska has a similar method: A jury must determine whether certain aggravating circumstances alleged ...

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — A Florida Supreme Court decision involving the death penalty has thrown between 100 to 150 cases into legal limbo, experts say. On Thursday, the court said it erred in 2016 when it ruled a jury must be unanimous in deciding a defendant convicted of murder should be sentenced to death. A day later, lawyers and anti-death penalty advocates were scrambling to determine what this means for existing cases that are in the resentencing phase. “No one knows how broadly the court will attempt to apply it,” said Robert Dunham of the Washington, D.C.-based Death Penalty Information Center. “And there are serious constitutional issues for all of the cases for which relief is being taken away.” Since the 2016 ruling, dozens of death row inmates who had been sentenced to die with nonunanimous jury decisions were granted new sentencing hearings. Dunham's group has identified 147 such cases, but it's unclear whether all will be subject to yet another r...

Justices back away from a 2016 decision TALLAHASSEE, Fla. --- The Florida Supreme Court said Thursday that unanimous jury recommendations are not necessary before death sentences can be imposed, as justices backed away from a 2016 decision that revamped the state’s capital-punishment system. The 4-1 ruling offered a clear picture of how much the Supreme Court has changed since last January, when a conservative majority took control after the retirements of longtime justices Barbara Pariente, R. Fred Lewis and Peggy Quince. Thursday’s majority opinion said the court “got it wrong” in 2016 when it required changes such as unanimous jury recommendations on death sentences. The 2016 ruling came as judges, lawyers and state leaders tried to move forward after the U.S. Supreme Court had found Florida’s death-penalty system unconstitutional. “Last, lest there be any doubt, we hold that our state Constitution’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment … does not require a...

Gary Ray Bowles started his eight-month murderous binge in Daytona Beach by killing John Hardy Roberts on March 14, 1994, inside the victim’s beachside home and now he is set to be the 99th death row inmate executed in Florida in modern times. The killing spree began in Daytona Beach. Eventually, in 1994, 6 men were savagely beaten and choked. One was bludgeoned with a discarded toilet. Each man fought for his life, but lost. In every case, the victims had something crammed down their throats — a towel, wads of toilet paper, a fistful of dirt. On Thursday, their killer, Gary Ray Bowles, is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection. Executions mark the end of some of society’s most heinous killings, but they also elicit objections to the practice of state-sponsored death. Holding the opposing view may become more difficult when it is argued on the behalf of an unrepentant serial murderer like Bowles, but there is still no end to the debate about the death p...