This spring, Father Dustin Feddon began waking up in the middle of the night. His heart pounding, he stood at the bathroom sink in the dark, splashing his face with cold water until the feeling passed.
For about a dozen years, Feddon visited prisoners on death row in Florida as their appeals wound through the courts. Some had been waiting for decades, but the priest learned, more or less, to accompany people through years of confinement and isolation without getting lost in their desolation. Then, in January 2025, Governor Ron DeSantis began signing death warrants at an accelerated pace. What followed was the busiest period of executions in more than eight decades in a state that has long been a bastion of capital punishment.
In November, DeSantis set the execution date for Frank Walls, one of the men Feddon advised. Walls was moved from death row at Union Correctional Institution, about an hour west of Jacksonville in the northeastern part of the state, to the nearby Florida State Prison. There he was placed in one of three cells, known as the death watch cell, located 30 feet from the execution room. And so Feddon embarked on the strange and intimate work of accompanying a condemned man through the final weeks of his life.
Seven days before Christmas, he sat next to Walls in the execution room, his hand resting on the man’s leg. Walls, with whom he had shared communion just hours before, was strapped to the cart, his head freshly shaved, IV drips running down his right arm. His chest began to heave as he gasped for air for several minutes. Feddon watched as the man’s eyes rolled back and his body went limp and still.
He was the 19th man put to death that year, breaking the state’s annual record of 11, first set in 1936; the Sunshine State accounted for 40% of all executions in the United States in 2025.
Soon other prisoners searched for the priest. One received an execution date in February, another in May. With each new death sentence, Feddon felt panic rising in his chest. The pace of executions had disrupted the nature of his work; he no longer took care of men condemned to death; he was preparing them to die.
Feddon spent years preparing for this role without really knowing it. He entered the seminary in his 30s after temporarily interrupting a doctoral program in religion, and during a year of practical ministry before his ordination, he began visiting prisoners. He then founded Joseph House, a rehabilitation center in Tallahassee, where he lives alongside men recently released from prison and often scarred by years of solitary confinement. There, he helps residents rebuild their lives by driving them to work, doctor appointments and therapy sessions; help them obtain identity cards and open bank accounts; mediate the inevitable dramas of community life. There were no days off. He spent one Christmas waiting with a resident in the emergency room.
In the spring, he took care of the two men who were waiting for death. As often as he could, he came to see them, spending four hours on the road, round trip, to talk and pray with the men as they awaited their execution. Some mornings he drove to the Florida State Prison after only a few hours of sleep; and some days he returned to Joseph House so exhausted that the demands and small crises that awaited him there seemed strangely distant. One afternoon, at a spiritual retreat, he was suddenly concerned that the priest standing before him speaking was on the verge of collapse. Searching for an explanation, he told me that he had become “hypervigilant about mortality – of other people dying, not of me, but of other people dying right in front of me.”
Florida has executed nine men this year, more than all other states combined. The pace transformed death watch, which was usually empty or held only one man at a time. Now all three cells are often occupied, with the next man to die housed closest to the room. After each execution, the prisoners move closer to a cell; then another convict receives an execution date and is transferred to the vacant cell. Death Watch, once a solitary station, has begun to resemble an assembly line.
Florida’s renewed embrace of the death penalty has occurred against the backdrop of a decades-long national retreat from capital punishment. Thirty-three states have either abolished the death penalty or have not carried out any executions in at least a decade. New death sentences have declined even faster, with capital prosecutors seeking them less often and juries more likely to choose life in prison. Just 23 people were sentenced to death in the United States last year, compared with 307 in 1995, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
Support for capital punishment has been eroded by a buildup of forces. The growing number of exonerations of death row inmates – more than 200 since the early 1970s – makes it impossible to ignore the risk of executing an innocent person. The high cost of capital prosecutions has forced many prosecutors to think twice before seeking death; the years of litigation required to obtain and defend a death sentence can add millions of dollars to a case. Decades of declines in violent crime have further dampened the public’s appetite for executions. Support for the death penalty is now at its lowest level since 1972; a Gallup poll last year found that a majority of Americans under 55 opposed it.
This July marks the 50th anniversary of the United States Supreme Court’s decision in Gregg v. Georgia, which reinstated the death penalty, making it a defining part of the American criminal justice system. But capital punishment has since lost its grip on the political imagination, with executions persisting only in a small number of states, including Texas, Oklahoma, Alabama and Missouri.
This retreat from capital punishment is evident in governors’ offices across the country. In 2000, Illinois Republican Governor George Ryan declared a moratorium on executions after 13 men on death row were exonerated; before leaving office, he commuted nearly all death sentences handed down in the state to life in prison. More recently, Democrats like Gov. Gavin Newsom of California and Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania have imposed or maintained moratoriums. In June, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine, a Republican and former prosecutor who helped write his state’s death penalty statute, called for the abolition of capital punishment in that state, concluding that it did not deter murder and abandoning his belief that it was morally justified.
President Donald Trump, by contrast, has long been one of the death penalty’s most vocal advocates, making it a cornerstone of his law and order agenda. He resumed federal executions in 2020, ending a 17-year hiatus and restoring punishment that had become an increasingly rare exercise of federal power. Before Trump took office, the federal government had executed only three people since 1963; in the last six months of his first term, he executed 13. He returned to the issue several times during the 2024 election campaign, calling for expanding the categories of crimes eligible for execution by proposing death sentences for drug traffickers, human traffickers and migrants who kill U.S. citizens.
Hours after taking office in January 2025, he signed a sweeping executive order titled “Reinstate the Death Penalty and Protect Public Safety” – signaling that the White House intended to put the full weight of the federal government behind reviving capital punishment. He asked the attorney general to pursue death sentences more aggressively, called on the Justice Department to challenge Supreme Court rulings limiting the death penalty, ordered federal officials to help states obtain the increasingly rare lethal injection drugs needed to carry out executions, and encouraged state prosecutors to seek the death penalty more often.
Nowhere has the president’s vision been pursued more fiercely than in Florida, thanks to an unusual concentration of power in the governor’s office. 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 is entirely up to the governor, who decides whether – and when – to sign a death warrant against any of the state’s eligible prisoners.
DeSantis, like his predecessors, makes enforcement decisions behind closed doors; The state Supreme Court has long held that setting execution dates is an exercise of the governor’s executive power, putting it beyond the reach of the state’s otherwise broad open government laws. As a result, there is no way of knowing what criteria DeSantis uses when choosing who will be put to death, Maria DeLiberato, a Tampa-based attorney working for the American Civil Liberties Union’s Capital Punishment Project, told me. “He could decide who will be next to die by throwing darts at a list of names,” she said, “or by spinning a roulette wheel.”
The secrecy surrounding these decisions has left victims’ families, prisoners and their lawyers searching for clues as to what principles, if any, guide DeSantis’ selection process. The length of time a prisoner has spent on death row does not appear to be a determining factor; DeSantis bypassed prisoners who committed their crimes as early as the 1970s, scheduling executions of men convicted of murders committed decades later. Without an obvious overarching logic governing the next choice, the process became a competition to attract – or avoid – his attention. In the hope of inciting him to issue a death warrant against Ronald Heath, found guilty e of the 1989 robbery and murder of a street vendor, the victim’s family sent personalized blue Sharpies to DeSantis — his pen of choice for signing both legislation and death warrants. DeSantis subsequently did so, and Heath was executed on February 10.
In March, after the execution of a man named Billy Kearse by lethal injection took about twice as long as usual, attorneys for another man on death row, Chadwick Willacy, filed a public records request seeking information about the state’s execution protocol. A week later, DeSantis signed Willacy’s death warrant. This timing introduced more fear and uncertainty into an already opaque process. Lawyers representing convicted prisoners wondered whether each legal challenge they raised risked drawing the governor’s attention — and whether a forceful plea, intended to save a client’s life, might instead bring him closer to death.
DeSantis has offered little public explanation for the record number of executions carried out since 2025 under his watch. This acceleration is particularly striking because it comes after years of relative inactivity. In 2019, the first year of DeSantis’s term, Florida carried out two executions, then three years passed without another. While six men were executed in 2023, only one was put to death the following year before the pace sharply accelerated in 2025. At a press conference in Jacksonville last November, a reporter asked him to explain the sudden increase.
DeSantis blamed the slow start to his gubernatorial term on disruptions from the pandemic as well as bureaucratic challenges. According to him, the meetings with the families of the victims strengthened his determination to see the old death sentences applied. “There’s a saying: Justice delayed is justice denied,” DeSantis said. “We are doing this so we can bring justice to the families of the victims.” When I reached out to his office for comment, Commons Leader Alex Lanfranconi responded briefly: “My advice to those seeking to avoid the death penalty in Florida would be to not murder anyone. »
Some observers see a different calculation. DeSantis is term limited and will leave office in January, but his political future remains an open question. Since his campaign for the White House ended in 2024, he has worked to repair his relationship with Trump; in April, Axios reported that he was pushing for a position in the administration, with an eye on attorney general. Few who follow Florida politics believe he has abandoned his presidential ambitions. The large number of death sentences, wrote the editorial boards from the Orlando Sentinel and South Florida Sun Sentinel last summer, “one wonders: Why the sudden rush? Is this another sign that he’s considering another run for president in 2028? Would he campaign as a governor who tried to empty his state’s death row?”
When DeSantis signs a death warrant, no one on death row knows who among them was selected until prison officials arrive at the condemned man’s cell. Of the 242 prisoners sentenced to death, about half have exhausted their appeals and are eligible for an arrest warrant. The routine is always the same: a group of uniformed officials suddenly appears, their arrival announced by the heavy cadence of boots on concrete and the metallic tinkling of handcuffs and restraints. “The warden is first, followed by the colonel, the major, the captain and about four of the biggest guards you’ve ever seen in your life,” a former death row inmate, John Buzia, who was sentenced to life in 2017, told me from prison. “They come down the wing and it’s completely silent, because they have a playful face.”
The men listen to the footsteps that pass from one cell to another. From inside their cell, they can barely see beyond their immediate neighbors, unless they slip a mirror between the bars, in violation of prison rules. Somewhere along the way, the footsteps stop. The director informs the man whose name appears on the piece of paper he is carrying that the governor has signed his death warrant. The prisoner is placed in restraints and returned to the wing before being transported to the Florida State Prison and placed on death watch.
Even before executions accelerated to 2025, waiting for this moment was an exercise in near-constant attentive listening. “You become very sensitive to hearing and sound,” Buzia said. Years spent in near-total isolation and the same monotonous routine sharpen the senses, giving the slightest break with the ordinary a disproportionate and terrifying significance: the unmistakable sound of several officers approaching, a certain clanking of keys, the wing suddenly falling silent.
Feddon saw the effects last July, when he went to visit Walls, who had been sentenced to death for killing an Air Force airman and his girlfriend during a robbery in 1987. Ten death warrants had been carried out in the previous seven months, and Walls was visibly nervous, telling the priest that he barely slept because he was sure his death warrant was going to be carried out at any moment. “They kind of know there’s this mysterious list,” Feddon said, “and they know they’re on it.” The walls, usually animated when he spoke of the saint or prayer that had most recently captured his imagination, struggled to collect his thoughts, and they sat in silence as he tried to concentrate. Feddon saw exhaustion finally take over Walls and he fell asleep.
Attorneys who represent death row inmates, most of whom work for Florida’s Capital Collateral Regional Counsel — a state-funded agency charged with representing death row inmates during their final appeals — live with the same uncertainty, never knowing which client will die suddenly, or when. Until a warrant is issued, they can only guess which of the many cases they are juggling will become the most urgent.
Texas, which historically has the busiest death chamber, requires at least 90 days between setting an execution date and the execution itself. But in Florida, the time between signing a death warrant and execution averages about a month. When an arrest warrant arrives, it can trigger an all-consuming race against time to determine whether there is a legal or factual reason why the execution should not proceed: Were there witnesses who were overlooked? Or leads that previous attorneys failed to recognize or fully investigate? Newer, more sensitive forms of forensic testing – which may have been unavailable or less reliable just a few years earlier – can shed light on old evidence. Advances in science and research may change the way courts view a prisoner’s long-standing allegations of mental illness or intellectual disability. The imminence of an execution can push witnesses who have remained silent for years to speak out.
This spring, a prisoner named James Duckett, convicted of raping and murdering an 11-year-old girl in 1987, was given an execution date. Five days before Duckett was put to death, the Florida Supreme Court stayed his execution while last-minute DNA testing and analysis was completed.
Cases like Duckett’s illustrate why the period between a death warrant and an execution is so important, serving as a final deadline protect against irreversible punishment. Florida’s history of wrongful convictions in capital cases underscores the stakes. No state has exonerated more death row inmates30 men in all.
Today, with the added pressure of death warrants coming in rapid succession, the burden on lawyers handling these cases has become even heavier. “You have an execution, and then after a week or two you’re working on an arrest warrant again,” says Linda McDermott, head of the Capital Habeas Unit at the Federal Defender’s Office in Tallahassee, which represents Florida’s death row inmates in federal court. Last year, eight prisoners represented by his office were executed.
The fast pace of the state leaves little room for error or the demands of life outside the courts. When DeSantis signed a death warrant against Kearse on Jan. 29, Kearse’s lead attorney of more than 20 years, Paul Kalil, was grappling with a family crisis: His father, hospitalized for several months, would enter hospice care less than a week later. As Kalil prepared final challenges to Kearse’s death sentence, his colleagues requested additional time, explaining in a court filing that “because of his ethical obligations to Mr. Kearse,” Kalil had not been able to spend sufficient time with his father in the final days of his life. The courts only granted 48 additional hours.
Kalil’s father died on February 8. Afterward, Kalil’s colleagues again asked for more time, explaining that the lawyer who was most familiar with the case was now mourning his father’s death and arranging the funeral. The Florida Supreme Court denied the request, and three weeks later Kearse was executed.
On April 21, the day Florida was scheduled to execute Willacy, I went to the vigil that was to take place outside the Florida State Prison near the small town of Starke. Across the two-lane highway from the prison, a few dozen people unfolded camping chairs on a sunny field, holding signs with messages such as “Execute justice, not people” and “Thou shalt not kill.” A single oak with a broad canopy provided the only shade. There were no satellite trucks or television crews, no signs that anything momentous was about to happen, except for a single counter-protester: a death penalty supporter who held up a sign listing the names of all the men executed since the start of 2025, each name crossed out with a red X.
The relative invisibility of executions — the sense that they are taking place with little public awareness — is what prompted Melanie Verdecia, a Jacksonville attorney, to begin writing a newsletter on Substack, “Tracking Florida’s Death Penalty,” which chronicles everything from new death penalty charges at last-minute death warrant trialin real time. Years ago, Verdecia told me, she was driving to the Florida Supreme Court, where she clerked, on the day of a scheduled execution, after spending weeks immersed in the legal battle over whether the execution would go ahead. As she sat in traffic, looking at the commuters around her, she realized that none of them had any idea that a man was going to die that day.
Verdecia is one of a small number of Floridians who meticulously track the state’s use of the death penalty, trying to ensure that executions — and more recently, the rise in the number of execution stops — don’t go completely unnoticed. On the afternoon of Willacy’s execution, Grace Hanna sat in a donut shop in Starke, keeping a different kind of ledger. Hanna, 29, executive director of Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, sat at her laptop as she communicated with a network of people affected, in one way or another, by the death penalty in Florida, including death penalty advocates whose clients had active warrants for their arrest and many of the state’s death row inmates, as well as family members of condemned prisoners who were preparing for their final visits or who cried following an execution. Hanna told me that one of the most haunting parts of her job is when she has to collect a condemned person’s ashes and deliver them to their family.
When Hanna was 8 years old and growing up in Tallahassee, a cousin who worked nights at a convenience store in North Carolina was beaten to death during a robbery. This crime sparked long conversations in her home about crime, punishment, and how society should respond after someone commits an act of violence. Her parents, Baptist deacons who eventually left the Church because of its refusal to ordain women, raised their children to confront them with such questions. “Obviously something is stuck,” Hanna told me. She later became a social worker and her brother a public defender. The man who killed his cousin was sentenced to life without parole, a punishment that spared his family the many years, even decades, of appeals that often accompany a death sentence. Justice, she declared, did not require the killing of another person.
That day, Hanna was writing a press release, as her team did every execution day, that would be sent out after Willacy was put to death. It began with recognizing the victim at the center of the case, Marlys Sather, who was 56 when she returned home to Palm Bay on her lunch break one day in 1990, interrupting a burglary. Court records show Willacy beat her, tied her up and set her on fire before fleeing.
These releases attempt to reflect two realities at once: the suffering caused by the crime and the complicated path that led to it. Drawing on court records, prison records, and years of discussions with the attorneys and family members who know these men best, Hanna writes about the forces that shaped their lives before prison: mental illness, intellectual disability, addiction, physical and sexual abuse, and childhoods marked by neglect. She also looks back on the decades of incarceration that followed their convictions, during which profound transformations sometimes took place. “That’s often the only obituary these men receive,” she said.
Yet that was not the central focus of Willacy’s statement she was writing. Hanna devoted much of it to his unsuccessful efforts to force the state to release documents relating to its lethal injection protocol. “All Floridians,” she wrote, “should ask themselves tonight: What is the State of Florida hiding in these archives?”
The execution took place that evening. Shortly after 6 p.m., as lethal injection drugs began to circulate, protesters gathered around a large metal bell. One by one, they advanced. “Not in my name,” everyone said before hitting him. The sound was low and echoing, echoing after each hit. The counterprotester, meanwhile, a skinny retiree named Bill Campbell, tried to drown out the sound with a boom box belting out “Another One Bites the Dust.”
Above them, the sky stretched to the horizon, luminous in the early evening light. “Every time we’re here for an execution, something wild happens in the sky, like a torrential downpour or the most beautiful sunset you’ve ever seen,” Hanna told me. She often takes a photo of the sky and sends it to the prisoner’s family if they can’t stand being there.
Soon, a convoy of white pickup trucks rolled out of the prison gates, carrying witnesses, two members of the media and prison officials. The Florida Department of Corrections announced Willacy’s time of death at 6:15 p.m.
Protesters folded their chairs and gathered their belongings. Half an hour later, the vigil site was empty. Across the road, there were no visible signs that a man had been put to death there that evening.
Another execution was already planned nine days later. James Hitchcock, one of the longest-serving prisoners on Florida’s death row, was scheduled to die on April 30. As Hanna walked to her car, she called another woman, “See you next week.”
Last December, as Florida was about to carry out its 19th execution of the year, a retired warden named Ron McAndrew sat down to write an opinion article for the Tampa Bay Times. A two-time DeSantis voter and a self-described “law and order man,” McAndrew was troubled by the rapid increase in executions. “This pace is important,” he wrote, “because executions depend on human beings performing complex, high-risk tasks under extreme pressure.” » He warned of the risk of a serious error and the consequences that weigh on those responsible for carrying out death sentences. “When something goes wrong in an execution chamber, it is not the elected officials who absorb the consequences,” he writes. It is the prison staff “who carry the memory long after the room has been cleaned and the state has moved on.”
McAndrew was warden at Florida State Prison in the mid-1990s, when Florida still used the electric chair. He accompanied three men to the execution chamber and gave the signal that sent electricity through their bodies. The last execution he oversaw, on March 25, 1997, would help hasten the end of Florida’s reliance on the electric chair. A few moments later, the prisoner Pedro Medina received the first electric shock, his head caught fire and the flames burst into the air. Smoke fills the room. Medina’s chest heaved until he was pronounced dead.
McAndrew threw away the uniform he wore that day, which smelled of burning flesh. Subsequently, Governor Lawton Chiles sent him to Texas to study lethal injection, the primary method used in Florida today. The cumulative weight of executions followed him. He drank heavily, sometimes downing a bottle of Johnnie Walker in a single day. At night, he often woke up to find the men whose executions he had overseen sitting on the edge of his bed. “They haunt me,” he told his wife.
Thirteen years of therapy allowed him to regain his footing. Now retired, he lives in the small town of Dunnellon, about 70 miles southwest of the Florida State Prison, where he hoped to live a quiet life, cruising along the Withlacoochee River on his pontoon boat. But as executions accelerated last year, he grew concerned about the fate of inmates at Florida State Prison, who were being asked to shoulder the burden he once carried, as well as the impact on them of so many killings. He knew what it was like to be inside the execution chamber, and what it was like for the other prison officials and staff who had to see the process through to the end. “It was damaging, and I mean very damaging, to the people in that room.”
I thought about the emotion with which McAndrew said “damaging” — as if describing a wound that never fully healed — when I spoke to Feddon on June 3, the day after the execution of a prisoner named Andrew Lukehart.
Feddon had accompanied Lukehart, sentenced to death for the 1996 murder of his girlfriend’s 5-month-old daughter, during the last month of his life. The crime, the remorse he carried, and the abuse that had marked his childhood were not the subjects Lukehart returned to most often. Time and again he spoke of the Camino de Santiago, the ancient pilgrimage route that winds through northern Spain, imagining that one day he might somehow travel its dusty roads. He and Feddon recited the prayers that the priest had found for him and that pilgrims have recited for generations along the Camino.
Late in the afternoon of June 2, Feddon had been brought into the execution chamber at Florida State Prison, where he sat next to Lukehart, who was strapped to the gurney, and placed his hand on the man’s leg. Lukehart’s execution was the third the priest had attended at Florida State Prison, and his voice was heavy when he spoke to me the next morning. “To begin the sacrament of last rites for an otherwise perfectly healthy man…” he said, trailing off.
He told me he had been inundated with images of the execution since waking up before dawn. Scenes follow one another: Lukehart’s face, red with blood, as if he had done a handstand; a doctor leaning on the gurney, lifting Lukehart’s eyelids to check that he was dead; the prayer rope that Feddon placed on the man’s still chest. That morning, before mass, the images played over and over in his mind. “I saw it and I saw it and I saw it.”
The priest struggled to reconcile what he thought he was called to do with what that calling now required of him, and how to move forward as death warrants continued to be signed at a relentless pace. How could he continue to do this work? And yet, how could he abandon the men who had asked him to walk alongside them? In the death chamber with Lukehart, Feddon told me he felt a tension between the privilege of being with the condemned, he said, “to speak words of healing, of love, of God’s mercy” in their hour of greatest need, contrasted with taking a life. “Everything makes you want to shout to the people around you: ‘Why are you making me do this?’ “, he said.
Lukehart was gone, but another prisoner he advised, Duckett, whose execution had been stayed for DNA testing, remained. Tests have yielded no clear answers, and prosecutors are now asking the Florida Supreme Court to lift the stay so the execution can proceed. The machinery of death had stopped for him, but only briefly. Feddon would return to Florida State Prison to see him in just a few days.