DeSantis Has One Week to Sign Controversial Death Penalty Expansion Bill

Gov. Ron DeSantis has just six days left to sign a controversial new bill allowing Florida to use more—or create new—execution methods for the state's worst offenders.

If he doesn't, the bill will die on May 26, exactly one week after the legislature sent him HB 903.

Sponsored by Republicans Rep. Berny Jacques and Sen. Jonathan Martin, the measure would expand Florida's death penalty options from lethal injection—the primary method—and electrocution to any method not deemed unconstitutional.

This means Florida could use hanging, lethal gas, firing squads, or a new, never-before-used method on death row inmates.

Why? Because no execution method has ever been declared unconstitutional.

"We're actually injecting another option for the death penalty," Martin said on the Senate Floor. "We don't have to look at only the options that are currently out there being used by other states."

If signed into law, Florida would break ground in the death penalty sphere, becoming the first state to explicitly allow any constitutional method to be used on prisoners. This changes current law, which would only allow other methods if lethal injection or electrocution were to be declared unconstitutional.

This isn't Florida's first foray into "first in the nation" status for executions. In 2023, the Sunshine State legalized the execution of child rapists and lowered the threshold for juries to recommend the death penalty from a unanimous decision to an 8-4 supermajority.

Florida's Death Penalty Facts

The Sunshine State has executed 111 people in the past half century, electrocuting 44 and lethally injecting 67. Though still legal, the electric chair hasn't been used since Allen Lee Davis's 1999 botched execution, which was the state's third faulty electrocution in less than a decade.

Death row inmates can still opt to be electrocuted instead of injected with the state's lethal drug cocktail, the default method, by written request. Wayne Doty, convicted of killing his cellmate, asked Florida in 2015 to electrocute him instead. Doty's execution date has yet to be set.

Under DeSantis, Florida currently leads the nation in 2025 executions with five killed and a sixth scheduled to die next month. This ties his personal record set in 2023. South Carolina, Texas, and Alabama make up the majority of the 10 other executions that have already taken place this year.

The most inmates Florida has killed in a single year is eight, once under Gov. Bob Graham in 1984 and again under Gov. Rick Scott in 2014.

Then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush is responsible for signing the most death warrants in a year: 40 in 2000, the last going underway just a month before he assumed the presidency.