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Florida Executed 19 People in a Year, a 90-Year Record. It Also Leads the Nation in Death-Row Exonerations.

Resist Now 3 min read
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Early in 2025, Gov. Ron DeSantis began signing death warrants faster than any Florida governor in the modern era. What followed was the most intense stretch of executions the state has carried out in more than eight decades. Florida executed 19 men in 2025, ProPublica reported, shattering a state record of 11 that had stood since 1936 and accounting for about 40% of all executions in the country.

The pace has not slowed. DeSantis has already signed 10 death warrants in 2026, keeping Florida on track to match or beat last year.

The Number Florida Does Not Advertise

Florida leads the nation in one other death-penalty statistic. Since 1973, 30 people sentenced to die in the state were later exonerated, more than in any other state, ahead of Illinois with 22 and Texas with 18.

Thirty is not an abstraction. Each one is a person the system condemned to death and later admitted it got wrong. The state now executing people fastest is also the state that has most often come within steps of killing the innocent.

Why the Two Records Are Linked

The connection runs through the jury box. After a 2023 law, Florida lets a jury recommend a death sentence by a vote of 8 to 4, without the unanimous agreement most states and serious felonies require. A Death Penalty Information Center review found that 92% of Florida’s exonerees had been condemned by juries that were not unanimous.

Split juries are where wrongful death sentences cluster, and Florida has widened that door at the same moment it has sped up the executions coming through it. Speed and a lower bar for condemning someone are a dangerous combination when the outcome cannot be reversed.

Against the National Grain

Most of the country is moving the other way. Executions have declined for years as states abandon or pause the death penalty, and public support has fallen. Florida is the outlier driving the national numbers back up largely by itself.

DeSantis frames the surge as overdue justice, saying his aim is to bring closure to victims’ families who waited decades for sentences to be carried out. That grief is real. It does not resolve the separate and permanent risk that some of the people being executed did not do it.

What You Can Do Now

  1. Use the letter below to ask Florida lawmakers to restore the requirement that a jury be unanimous before anyone is sentenced to death, and to pause executions long enough to review cases decided by non-unanimous juries or carrying unresolved innocence claims.

  2. Call your state legislators. Whatever your view on the death penalty, ask whether they believe someone should be executed on an 8-4 jury vote in the state with the most wrongful death-row convictions in America.

  3. Support the review groups. Organizations like the Death Penalty Information Center and innocence projects document these cases and win exonerations. Their work is the reason we know the number is 30, and not lower because the mistakes went uncaught.

Sources

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