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Florida executed James Robertson on Tuesday, an inmate who killed his cellmate so that he would be sentenced to death, as controversy grows in the United States following the failed lethal injection of an inmate, Christa Pike, in Tennessee.
James Robertson, 63, received a lethal injection at 12:32 local time (16:32 GMT) at Florida State Prison in Raiford, in the north of the state, making it the seventeenth execution in Florida so far this year, which set a state record of 19 in 2025.
The state was set to execute two people on the same day, but Governor Ron DeSantis halted the death of 74-year-old William Lee Thompson, who suffers from dementia, according to his defense.
Robertson was convicted of strangling his cellmate, Frank Hart, in 2008 at a prison in southwestern Florida, where he was serving sentences for robbery, weapons charges, assault, and sexual battery, but he confessed that he killed to be sentenced to death, according to the Florida Supreme Court.
This execution took place amid national controversy over the case of Pike, the only woman on death row in Tennessee, who survived a lethal injection on September 30, an unprecedented event in the modern era of capital punishment in the country, according to the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC).
Tennessee authorities maintained that they followed protocol, and Governor Bill Lee, a Republican, ordered an independent review and suspended the remaining executions for the year, according to the DPIC.
DeSantis signed Robertson's execution warrant on October 1, the day after the failed attempt in Tennessee.
The United States has totaled 31 executions this year, 17 of them in Florida, more than the other five states that carried them out combined, according to the DPIC.
Dozens of Latino evangelical leaders were scheduled to meet this Tuesday in Tallahassee, the capital of Florida, to ask DeSantis to suspend the executions, as announced by the evangelical organization Mission Talk.
They intended to deliver a letter signed by more than 70 bishops, pastors, and other leaders of Latino churches in the state.
The founder and president of Mission Talk, Agustín Quiles, accused the governor of having turned Florida into the capital of executions in the United States while the rest of the country moves away from the death penalty.
Florida has two more executions scheduled, on October 20 and November 5, and if both are carried out, it will equal the 19 from 2025, a record in its modern history.
[Publicidad]