U.S. Sets Execution Record with 37 So Far This Year, 14 in Florida

With 37 executions so far in 2025, the United States surpassed on Tuesday the figures from 2014, when 35 were recorded, while Florida leads the surge with 14 deaths—its highest number in decades.

Florida carried out the death penalty today against Samuel Smithers, convicted of the 1996 murders of two women he had paid for sexual relations, while Missouri executed 48-year-old Lance Shockley for the 2005 killing of a state trooper.

Smithers, aged 72, was executed at Florida State Prison in Raiford by lethal injection, according to the Florida Department of Corrections.

With this execution, the state raised to fourteen the number of executions conducted so far this year, marking a record for Florida in the 21st century.

Since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, Florida had never surpassed eight executions in a single year—a figure it reached in 2014.

Trailing behind are Texas, with five executions, and South Carolina and Alabama, with four each, amid a nationwide resurgence in the use of capital punishment after several years of decline, according to data from the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC).

Smithers’ case—who became one of the oldest individuals executed in Florida—dates back to the 1996 murders of two women in Tampa. According to court documents, he brutally beat, strangled, and dumped their bodies in a pond while working as a groundskeeper at the time.

The Florida Supreme Court rejected Smithers’ appeal last week, which included arguments claiming that his age rendered him ineligible for the death penalty under the U.S. constitutional prohibition of “cruel and unusual punishments.”

Smithers was executed by lethal injection, the method used in the state. The protocol involves three drugs: a sedative, a paralytic, and a heart-stopping agent.

The use of this method has been controversial due to the risk of physical suffering during execution, errors in drug administration, and the ethical debate over whether it truly constitutes a “humane” form of capital punishment.

With this execution, Florida reaffirms its position as the state most reliant on the death penalty. Governor Ron DeSantis, a Republican, has approved 16 executions so far this year.

The next executions scheduled are those of inmates Norman Grim (October 29) and Bryan Jennings (November 13), both convicted of murder in Florida.

Meanwhile, Missouri executed Shockley, who was convicted of murdering State Highway Patrol Sergeant Carl Dewayne Graham Jr. in March 2005.

At least nine additional executions are planned across the country this year.

Ohio, on the other hand, has already issued execution orders for the next three years—27 in total—but its Republican governor, Mike DeWine, stated that none will be carried out unless a new method is adopted, describing lethal injection in 2020 as “impractical from a functional standpoint.”