Ron DeSantis
Editor emeritus
Editor emeritus
Ron DeSantis
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The self-proclaimed Sunshine State has no income tax, and a lot of the well-to-do take up residence there in their golden years to avoid the taxes they had to pay in other states. So it’s fitting that it’s President Donald Trump’s official residence.
It’s also fitting because Trump is a big fan of executing people. And Florida is the execution capital of the United States.
An outspoken proponent of capital punishment, Trump ordered the resumption of federal executions in 2020 after a 17-year hiatus. Within hours of being inaugurated for his second term, Trump signed an executive order titled “Restoring the Death Penalty and Protecting Public Safety,” a signal that the White House intended to put the full weight of the federal government behind the revival of capital punishment.
And Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is with him all the way. DeSantis, we learn in an in-depth report last Sunday’s New York Times magazine, is on a mission to put convicted criminals to death.
Florida has long had a high execution rate, but in January 2025, DeSantis, a Trump acolyte, began signing death warrants at an accelerated rate. What followed, Times reporter Pamela Colloff tells us, was the busiest period of executions in more than eight decades.
Florida law bestows a unique power to governors to carry out executions. The state Supreme Court has held that, unlike in other states, setting execution dates is an exercise of the governor’s executive authority.
“Nowhere has the president’s vision been pursued more relentlessly than in Florida, thanks to an unusual concentration of power in the governor’s office,” Colloff writes. “In most states that still carry out executions, the process follows a familiar legal path: Once a condemned prisoner has exhausted his appeals, courts — not governors — set execution dates. In Florida, however, the decision rests entirely with the governor, who decides whether — and when — to sign a death warrant for one of the state’s eligible prisoners.”
DeSantis put 19 people to death in 2025, shattering the state’s annual record of 11, set in 1936. The Sunshine State accounted for 40% of all executions in the United States in 2025, and so far this year another nine executions have been carried out, more than every other state combined.
Other states have been exercising restraint on executions ever since studies in recent years have shown that as many as 200 innocent people have been executed in the last 50 years — 11 in Illinois alone.
The advent of new forensic technology and DNA evidence have proven that innocent people, convicted and sentenced to death by juries, have been executed. Unlike life in prison, there’s no way to correct mistakes.
Thirty-three states have either abolished the death penalty — Wisconsin is famously one of them — or not carried out an execution in at least a decade. Polls show that more than half of the country is now opposed to capital punishment.
But an undaunted DeSantis is not only ordering the executions, but short-circuiting attempts to introduce new evidence that might reveal a person’s innocence.
A couple of Florida newspapers have speculated that DeSantis, who is term-limited as governor this year, may be trying to please Trump. The papers suggested he may be looking for a Trump appointment, perhaps as attorney general, when he leaves the governor’s office at the end of the year.
You’d hope that DeSantis would have a better reason, even if it were a twisted notion of how to enhance the safety of the residents of the state he governs. But that’s probably giving him too much credit.
Dave Zweifel is editor emeritus of The Capital Times. dzweifel@madison.com, 608-252-6410 and on Twitter @DaveZweifel.
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