By Noreen Marcus, FloridaBulldog.org
Gov. Ron DeSantis, who’s never seen merit in a Death Row clemency case, is barreling toward a second record year for Florida executions before he leaves office.
The governor expresses sympathy for victims’ families and says he must do whatever he can to meet their need for prompt justice and closure. But critics of his execution surge say it springs from callous political handicapping. Polls show most Americans support the death penalty for convicted murderers.
If DeSantis makes another run at the presidency in 2028, he’ll campaign on his Florida record: 19 executions in 2025 and slightly more in 2026, amounting to 40 percent of the nationwide total in 2025 and over half the total so far this year.
“In recent years Florida has stood out to be one of the most enthusiastic users of the death penalty under Ron DeSantis,” said Robin Maher, executive director of the nonpartisan Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC) in Washington, D.C. “Florida is the outlier in the country and really in modern history.”
DeSantis presents a stark contrast to California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a likely Democratic presidential contender in 2028. He’s emptying his state’s massive Death Row by commuting 548 death sentences to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
The critics who accuse DeSantis of playing politics with death warrants zero in on two November executions of men with a shared horrific past.
Both Jesse Guardado, executed by lethal injection at Starke on Nov. 5, and Thomas Overton, scheduled to die on Nov. 19, did time at Dozier, the Panhandle reform school known for a culture of extreme cruelty.
A team of forensic researchers from the University of South Florida in Tampa uncovered evidence that at least 98 boys died at the school. The state claimed a much smaller number of boys perished from natural causes, but the researchers found signs of severe malnutrition and infections, and even blunt-force trauma. They also located spent shotgun pellets.
“We found nearly twice as many burials as were thought to exist, but many of them had been lost in the woods under brush and trees,” Professor Erin Kimmerle, head of the USF team, told The Guardian newspaper.
After subsidizing Dozier for 111 years, the state shut it down in 2011.
Dozier is a sensitive topic for law-and-order champ DeSantis. His Republican predecessor, Sen. Rick Scott, acknowledged it was hell on earth for the boys – most of them Black – sent to Dozier for crimes as petty as truancy or as guiltless as having no place to call home.
The Florida Legislature formally apologized to survivors of that state-sanctioned abuse in 2017. DeSantis didn’t apologize but he signed a bill in 2024 setting up a $20 million compensation fund for some living victims of Dozier and a second reform school in Okeechobee.
The governor signed the bill during a closed-door ceremony at an undisclosed location somewhere in the Capitol complex. Reporters weren’t invited.
‘DOZIER BOYS’ EXECUTIONS
Appeals courts never heard about the torture Dozier inflicted on Guardado.The record shows that in 2004 he killed Jackie Malone, a woman who had befriended him, during a crack binge. Guardado’s advocates stressed that he turned himself in and confessed, quickly pleaded guilty and waived his right to a trial.
Guardado was the eleventh known “Dozier boy” executed in Florida. Unless a court intervenes very soon, Overton will be the twelfth.
“I find it incredibly hypocritical,” said Grace Hanna, executive director of Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty (FADP).
“The state is recognizing the harm caused to these children, has built multiple monuments to this, written checks, but when it comes to their legal process and how that trauma may have impacted crimes that put them on Death Row, the state has said it doesn’t matter, that’s not a reason to mitigate a sentence,” she said.
On DeSantis’s watch, the state works hard to hasten the march from conviction to execution. Lethal drugs reportedly were mislabeled to extend their shelf life.
“When people are being executed at such a rapid pace, errors are going to happen in the administration of drugs or perhaps in how we are carrying out the lethal injection procedure, and the state has sought to avoid any accountability or safeguards on that,” Hanna said.
The Board of Executive Clemency, composed of the governor and cabinet, looks like a dodge for DeSantis – and previous governors – to avoid dissent. “It appears we have a clemency process on paper but we don’t have one in practice. There’s been no clemency since 1983,” Hanna noted.
Rushing to execute Death Row inmates allows little or no time for the legal procedures that ensure the wrong person isn’t put to death. Shortcuts to execution violate inmates’ constitutional right to due process, Hanna and other prisoner advocates argue.
The three liberal U.S. Supreme Court justices had due process problems with Guardado’s case that didn’t change the outcome. “Everything has been said already; but as no one listens, we must always begin again,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in a 2018 dissent, quoting the French writer Andre Gide.
In fact, Florida has put the wrong people to death, or at times has come very close to doing so. Maher of the DPIC counts 30 exonerations, more than any other state’s, since the U.S. Supreme Court allowed capital punishment to resume nationwide in 1976.
“You would think in the wake of that many mistakes, some reforms would be implemented,” she said, “but that’s never happened in Florida.”
WITNESSES AT GUANTANAMO
DeSantis’s behavior before and after he was elected governor suggests he’s not only indifferent to prisoners’ suffering, he favors a policy of cruelty. As governor he eagerly supports the detention of immigrants in subpar facilities like the now-shuttered “Alligator Alcatraz.”
Florida Bulldog has reported extensively on DeSantis’s military service in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. He was a U.S. Navy JAG officer stationed at the naval base there in 2006-07.
At that time naval command responded to widespread prisoner hunger strikes with force-feedings. Prisoners were seated in a chair with built-in restraints, strapped tight and fed Ensure through a nose tube.
The United Nations and international human rights groups condemned force-feeding as torture, while the U.S. government spun it as a humane response to attempted suicide and security threats.
Two former prisoners, Mansoor Adayfi and Ahmed Ould Abdel Aziz, told Florida Bulldog they saw DeSantis enter cell blocks with force-feeding teams and observe the scene without telling the guards to stop. Adayfi had previously told his story to the Eyes Left podcast.
Part of DeSantis’s Navy personnel file, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, stated that one of his duties was “detention operations.” Almost all prisoners at Guantanamo, which remains open for a dozen or so inmates, are “unlawful enemy combatants” held without formal charges, some of them for years.
DeSantis rejected the Guantanamo allegations raised by Florida Bulldog and other media, calling them “totally BS.”
Death penalty opponents have urged him in vain to witness one of the executions he’s ordered. Florida Bulldog asked his office why he stays away and got no response.
Ali Shakoor was until recently a lawyer for the state agency that represents Death Row inmates. He switched to the private practice of insurance defense law after volunteering to watch Loran Cole, his last government client, die by lethal injection.
At their final meeting, “Loran gave Ali advice on how to persevere through life. Loran, condemned to die, also comforted Ali, who could not hold his emotions together,” Substack contributor Zach Kahn wrote after interviewing Shakoor. “Here Ali Shakoor was talking to a man who did some horrible things, but also a man who is a human being.”
Last month he explained the DeSantis request. “Shakoor strongly believes that Governor DeSantis should witness every single execution in order to see the result of his warrant-signing action,” Kahn wrote.
But the governor ignores calls to explain his absence because he can. Under Florida law he doesn’t have to account for any decision about the death penalty.
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