TALLAHASSEE — After last-minute appeals were denied in state and federal court, Richard Knight was executed Thursday night at Florida State Prison for the 2000 murder of his cousin’s girlfriend Odessia Stephens and her four-year-old daughter Hanessia Mullings.
Knight, 47, was pronounced dead at 6:13 p.m., according to the state Department of Corrections.
The execution came after the U.S. Supreme Court, with no noted dissents, issued orders Thursday afternoon rejecting attempts to spare Knight.
The Florida Supreme Court later unanimously denied an emergency stay sought by Knight’s counsel, which pointed to the planned execution of Tony Carruthers by Tennessee being called off Thursday morning after officials struggled to find a vein to administer a dose of pentobarbital.
The filing urged the court to halt the execution on the grounds Florida’s lethal injection protocol violates the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.
“Despite the state’s facade, lethal injection is not a medical procedure,” Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty Executive Director Grace Hanna said in a statement on Thursday. “Allowing untrained prison staff to perform surgery on living, breathing person without anesthesia is not justice. It is torture.”
READ MORE: Executions nearly doubled in the U.S. last year, Florida leads the count
The state court ruling didn’t provide a reason for the denial.
The Florida Supreme Court last Friday rejected other motions by Knight’s attorneys for a stay of the execution.
DeSantis, who signed Knight’s death warrant on April 22, didn’t publicly respond to the conference’s appeal or similar requests made prior to other executions.
The warrant for Knight was the eighth of nine DeSantis has signed this year. Seven have now been carried out.
A report released Sunday by Amnesty International noted that executions last year in the U.S. were the highest for a single year since 2009, and Florida conducted 19 of the 47 executions carried out by 11 states.
South Carolina, Texas, and Alabama had five each.
Attorney General James Uthmeier defended the state’s use of the death penalty while in Brooksville on Tuesday.
“We used to have a lot of litigation on execution nights, where sometimes we’d be up till midnight waiting for courts to decide,” Uthmeier said. “We don’t see that as much anymore. I think people realize that the state is carrying out its obligation. We all take an oath to enforce the law.”
According to court records, Knight became irate after Stephens asked him to move out of the Broward County apartment where she lived with his cousin Hans Mullings and her daughter. Hans Mullings was not home at the time. After going outside to walk, Knight returned, exchanged more words with Stephens, got a knife from the kitchen and went to the master bedroom where he began stabbing Stephens until she stopped resisting.
“He then moved on to little Hanessia, stabbing her until his knife broke and cutting his hand in the process,” court records state.
Stephens had 21 stab wounds. Mullings was stabbed four times and had bruises on her neck consistent with being strangled, records state.
Knight showered and changed but before he could clean the knives, police knocked on the door, interrupting him. Knight climbed out a window but was quickly apprehended.
He was convicted of first-degree murder in April 2006 and sentenced to death for the two murders in March 2007.
The Florida Supreme Court upheld the convictions and death sentence in 2011 and affirmed a trial court order denying his motion for postconviction relief in 2017.
The next execution scheduled is for Andrew Lukehart, 53, on June 2. The window to carry out the sentence runs from noon, June 2 through noon, June 9.
Lukehart was convicted of first-degree murder and aggravated child abuse for the February 1996 death of five-month-old Gabrielle Hanshaw, his girlfriend’s daughter, in Duval County.
