Florida will account for nearly 60% of all U.S. executions this year if Harold Gene Lucas is put to death as scheduled Sept. 1.
If carried out as planned, Lucas’ lethal injection will be the 14th for the state and the 24th in the nation in 2026. The 74-year-old was condemned for the 1977 murder of his teenage girlfriend.
“It’s astounding and incredibly frustrating,” said Grace Hanna, executive director of Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty. “Floridians deserve better than the death penalty, we deserve better than to treat our citizens this way and to treat our fellow humans this way.”
Florida has been the leading killer of Death Row inmates since President Donald Trump issued his Jan. 20, 2025, executive order seeking to expand capital punishment. Since then, 34 inmates have died in the state’s death chamber, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
Gov. Ron DeSantis, who took office in 2019, ordered a total of nine executions before the beginning of Trump’s second term last year.
Florida’s numbers also result from having a governor with sole authority to schedule executions, requiring only eight of 12 jurors to condemn and a heavy emphasis on procedural rulings in passing sentence. Clemency hasn’t been granted in the state since 1983.
While Texas set the modern record for executions with 40 in 2000, Florida broke its own record with 19 in 2025, Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty reported.
The state is currently on pace to finish the year with 16 executions as Daniel Owen Conahan Jr., and Curtis Beasley are scheduled to die in September along with Lucas.
Nationally, however, executions are trending downward, DPIC reported. “Last year, in the first six months of 2025, states other than Florida carried out 18 executions. In the first six months of 2026, they carried out seven.”
As of mid-August, Texas had executed four, Oklahoma three, and one each by Arizona, Louisiana and Tennessee.
Laura Porter
Death sentences also are decreasing nationally, including in Florida, where five sentences where handed down in 2025 and again in 2026. “The state is removing people from Death Row by execution roughly three times faster than its juries are adding them,” the DPIC report notes.
Death penalty abolitionists describe the use of capital punishment in Florida as appalling and outrageous.
“While both Democratic and Republican governors are examining cases with significant issues, Florida, in an unprecedented pace, is executing veterans who served in combat, people with intellectual disabilities and severe mental illness, and people who received settlements from the state for the excruciating abuse they were subjected to in the state juvenile system before the state executed them,” said Laura Porter, executive director of the U.S. Campaign to End the Death Penalty.
Grace Hanna
Hanna condemned what she called DeSantis’ cruel and politically motivated use of the death penalty at a time when it is becoming increasingly unpopular in the state.
“We were having 25-plus (death sentences) per year in the 2010s but juries are not sentencing people to death anywhere near that rate compared to then. Our state is running toward executions just as Floridians are showing increasingly that they don’t have an appetite for the death penalty,” Hanna said.
But with a term-limited DeSantis set to leave office in January, the brutal pace and number of state-sanctioned killings may help diminish or end the practice in Florida, she added.
“Here in Florida, we are laying the groundwork for things to be different and for the death penalty to end because, ultimately, the death penalty is dying out in America, and it can’t sustain itself at the pace it’s been going here.”