For a long time, when Americans thought about the death penalty, they thought of Texas. Every year for the last several decades, the Lone Star State led the nation in new death sentences and executions.
But no more. Every year since 2019, Texas has carried out fewer than 10 executions. Last year, only five people were put to death in Texas. So far in 2025, it has carried out four executions, with two more scheduled for before the end of the year.
Meanwhile, following a plan I described two years ago, Florida has jumped to the head of the death penalty pack. This year, it has already executed 10 people, with two more scheduled in 2025. NBC News reports that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis will oversee “more executions in a single year than any other Florida governor since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976.” And last year, seven new death sentences were imposed by Florida juries — the highest number in the nation.
As it has ramped up its death penalty, Florida has also doubled down on the problems and the injustices that mark the use of capital punishment everywhere.
How has Florida made the death penalty a more prominent part of its criminal justice system? In 2023, it passed a law making the sexual assault of a child under 12 by an adult a capital crime. It did so in the face of a 2009 United States Supreme Court decision that had struck down a similar Louisiana law.
This was no accident. The bill included language asserting that Kennedy v. Louisiana was “wrongly decided” and constituted “an egregious infringement of the states’ power to punish the most heinous of crimes.”
In December 2023, a prosecutor announced that he would seek the death penalty for Joseph Andrew Giampa, who was charged with sexual battery on a child under age 12. However, Giampa later pleaded guilty in return for a sentence of life in prison.
At the same time, Florida extended the reach of its death penalty, making it easier to convict people of capital crimes. Its new law replaced the requirement that only a unanimous jury could authorize a death sentence, with a provision saying that death could be imposed if eight out of 12 jurors voted for it.
That made Florida just the second state — Alabama being the other — allowing non-unanimous juries to impose a death sentence.
In January 2025, the state legislature passed the so-called Trump Act, mandating “the automatic imposition of the death penalty for ‘unauthorized aliens’ convicted of capital offenses.” DeSantis signed the legislation, even though it was a marked departure from Supreme Court precedent dating back to 1976 forbidding mandatory death sentences.
And in June, Florida passed legislation expanding the death penalty to offenses including cases of child sex trafficking. In addition, it opened the door for the use of any method of execution “deemed” constitutional, rather than specifying particular methods.
Add to this the spike in executions, and you get a sense of why Florida is the new Texas.
That spike may be driven by DeSantis’s political ambitions. He is term-limited and could be eyeing a position in the Trump administration. In May, the governor reiterated his support for capital punishment, saying that there are “some crimes that are so horrific that the only appropriate punishment is the death penalty.” The death penalty, he said, “expresses the outrage of the community.”
But Florida’s recent death penalty history suggests that something else is at work. From 2020 to 2022, during DeSantis’s first term, it carried out no executions. Was there no outrage to be expressed?
In 2023, as DeSantis ramped up his presidential campaign, he signed six death warrants. In 2024, during most of which he was no longer a candidate, he signed just one.
There is a clear pattern in the people whose death warrants DeSantis does sign. Research has shown that 72 percent of all executions carried out in Florida between 1976 and 2014 were for crimes involving white victims, even though only 56 percent of all homicide victims are white. At the same time, 71 percent of the executions carried out against black inmates were for homicides involving white victims.
This pattern has continued under DeSantis. A lawsuit filed last month alleges that 95 percent of the execution warrants he has signed have been in cases involving white victims.
All this suggests that Florida’s newfound enthusiasm for the death penalty has yet to be matched with equal enthusiasm for doing justice in capital cases. It is long past time to address that problem.
Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College.
