The Florida context from Florida Phoenix: Three death warrants are pending in Florida as of this writing, for Norman M. Grim Jr. in the 1998 rape and murder of his neighbor in Escambia County; Bryan Jennings in the 1979 kidnapping, rape, and murder of a 6-year-old girl in Brevard County; and Richard B. Randolph in the beating, strangling, stabbing, and rape of his former employer in Putman County. All have petitions for stays pending before the Florida Supreme Court.
Alabama’s execution of Anthony Boyd on Thursday added to the growing number of executions for the year.
Boyd was the 40th person executed in 2025 with another two months left in the year, according to figures obtained from the Death Penalty Information Center website. It is the largest number of executions in the nation since 2013.
The executions are also heavily concentrated geographically, with nearly all originating from southern, Republican-leaning states. This is especially true for Florida and its geographic neighbors.
“Florida, though, has carried out 14 executions so far, so it is leading the country in the number of executions,” Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, said in an interview prior to Boyd’s execution. “The state has three more executions scheduled for this year. If you took Florida out of the equation, we would have a very different year.”
The increasing frequency builds on a trend that has been happening for the past several years since the most recent trough during the coronavirus pandemic. In 2021 when states throughout the country put 11 people to death. Since then, the figure has been increasing, going to 18 in 2022; 24 in 2023 and 25 in 2024.
After Florida, Alabama and Texas have had the second-highest number of executions this year, with five each. South Carolina has put four people to death in 2025.
Only four of the 40 people were executed in states outside the South. There were two in Arizona and another two in Indiana.
Executions usually occur decades after the original sentence. A person on death row can take 25 to 30 years to exhaust their appeals.
“In criminal justice, the climate of the 1990s, we are talking tough-on-crime,” said Kenya Brumfield-Young, an associate professor of criminology and criminal justice at Saint Louis University. “We were in the middle of the crack era. We are seeing extremely violent and heinous crimes. We have got extreme violence through bicoastal gang warfare, Bloods, Crips and everybody in the middle. And that was also the peak of the War on Drugs. We were very heavy handed relative to crime control in the late 1980s and early 1990s.”
Four of Alabama’s five executions this year involved crimes committed more than 25 years ago. Boyd was sentenced to death for the 1993 murder of Gregory Huguley; Boyd maintained his innocence through Thursday’s execution. Alabama put Demetrius Terrence Frazier to death in February after he was convicted and sentenced to death for his role in a murder that happened in 1991. Gregory Hunt was executed in February for the murder of Karen Lane in 1988, the same year that more than 300 other people were sentenced to death. Geoffrey Todd West was executed in June for the murder of Margaret Parish Berry in 1997.
The only exception was James Osgood who was executed in April for the murder of Tracy Brown in 2010.
The sentences were imposed at a time when support for the death penalty reached 80%, according to Maher.
“There were 316 new death sentences imposed in the United States in 1996,” Maher said. “And in 1996, there were 45 executions. The real high was in 1999 when there were 98 executions. So, in the late 1990s there were many more new death sentences and many more executions.”
The political environment also plays a role for deciding whether to authorize an execution.
“The Trump-affiliated governors are simply competing for who can issue more death warrants,” said Frank Baumgartner, who researches capital punishment, a professor of political science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “It didn’t used to be that way. It was always a southern phenomenon, but it wasn’t a particular ideology.”
President Donald Trump authorized the execution of 13 people incarcerated in federal prison, six of whom were put to death after the November 2020 election, which he lost to Joe Biden.
Trump issued an executive order in January encouraging offices of attorneys general around the nation to bring capital charges for all capital crimes, especially for those who kill law enforcement or for people without the necessary paperwork to reside in the country.
“The (U.S.) Attorney General shall take all appropriate action to seek the overruling of Supreme Court precedents that limit the authority of state and federal governments to impose capital punishment,” the executive order states.
Just about all the states who have executed people in the past year have supported Trump. Oklahoma and Texas are states that have been traditionally active in its use of capital punishment, but now others, including Alabama, have become more aggressive.
The 11 people that Alabama has executed combined for this year and 2024 equal that of the prior six years, from 2018-2023.
Criminal justice experts have a mixed view whether the trend will continue.
“We are going back to this tough-on-crime ideology, and the emphasis on finality, that is going to be a major driver in, not necessarily what is considered to be an uptick, but it is going to be the carrying out of sentences,” Brumfield-Young said. When we speak of uptick, I think we are actually speaking to the number of executions that are carried out. We have to keep in mind that the court had already issued the death penalty order.”
Maher said that the recent increases in the number of executions is not indicative of a longer-term trend. The number of new death sentences issued in 2024 was 26, a fraction of the more than 300 that were issued in courts during the peak in the 1990s.
“This is a year, this is a data point among many,” she said. “The long term trend, which is very important to pay attention to, has been that we have been moving away from the use of the death penalty in the past 25 years.”
She added that, “I think public officials, if they are paying attention to what their constituents want, probably don’t realize they are very much out of step with what their constituents want to see with the use of the death penalty.”
This story was originally produced by Alabama Reflector, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Florida Phoenix, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.
Florida Phoenix is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Michael Moline for questions: info@floridaphoenix.com.
