Florida Carries Out 19th Execution Of The Year
HuffPost
The execution of Frank Walls marked the highest number of state-sanctioned killings by a single state in more than 15 years.
Florida carried out its 19th execution of the year on Thursday night, the highest number of state-sanctioned killings by a single state in the U.S. in more than 15 years.
Florida executed 58-year-old Frank Walls by lethal injection as punishment for the 1987 killings of Edward Alger and his girlfriend Ann Peterson when Walls was 19 years old. He later confessed to three additional killings.
Walls’ death marked the 47th execution of 2025 — nearly twice the number of executions from the previous year. (An additional execution scheduled for Wednesday in Georgia was suspended amid conflict-of-interest revelations in the case.) A small number of outlier states drove the surge. Florida, alone, accounted for 40% of all executions in the country this year. Texas is the only other state that has ever executed more than 18 people in a single year, most recently in 2009, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
Autopsies of those executed by lethal injection indicate that the process may cause the lungs to fill with fluid, creating the sensation of suffocating or drowning to death, NPR previously reported. Ahead of his execution, Walls asked the Supreme Court to halt the killing, arguing that his intellectual disability made him ineligible for execution and that execution logs from the Florida Department of Corrections showed the state’s execution practices were error-prone.
The logs “revealed a wide range of errors such as habitual inaccuracies in documenting when drugs are removed from storage, indicating that their records are inaccurate and being filled out after executions take place, the removal and/or preparation of the wrong quantity of certain drugs before past executions, documented improvisation and usage of drugs not itemized in the protocol, and even documented use of expired etomidate during past executions,” Walls’ lawyers wrote in a court filing.
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