Pedro Luis Medina was a Cuban refugee who was executed in Florida for the murder of a 52-year-old woman in Orlando. The circumstances of his execution elevated objections to the use of electrocution as a means of capital punishment. During his execution, Medina's head burst into flames, filling the death chamber with smoke. An autopsy later revealed that the current had destroyed Medina's brain, killing him instantly.
Oba Chandler was an American serial killer and mass murderer who was convicted and executed for the June 1989 murders of Joan Rogers and her two daughters, whose bodies were found floating in Tampa Bay, Florida, with their hands and feet bound. Autopsies showed the victims had been thrown into the water while still alive, with ropes tied to a concrete block around their necks. The case became high-profile in 1992 when local police posted billboards bearing enlarged images of the suspect's handwriting recovered from a pamphlet in the victims' car. Chandler was identified as the killer when his neighbor recognized the handwriting.
Nelson Iván Serrano Sáenz is a former Ecuadorian businessman and a naturalized American citizen who was convicted of murdering Frank Dosso, Diane Patisso, George Patisso, and George Gonsalves in the town of Bartow, Polk County, Florida, on December 3, 1997. The jury pronounced him guilty and recommended the death penalty for Serrano in October 2006 after he was convicted of the murders. On June 26, 2007, Judge Susan Roberts sentenced him to death by lethal injection for each of these crimes. Serrano's conviction is controversial, and his culpability has been disputed.
Philip Ray Workman was a death row inmate executed in Tennessee on May 9, 2007. He was convicted in 1982 for the murder of a police officer following a robbery of a Wendy's restaurant in Memphis, Tennessee, and sentenced to death by lethal injection.
Ryan Keith Skipper was an American man from Polk County, Florida, who was murdered on March 14, 2007, in what authorities declared a hate crime. Skipper's body was discovered on March 15 along a roadside in Wahneta, Florida. Two men were arrested in connection with the crime: William David Brown Jr., and Joseph Bearden, 20 and 21 years old at the time of the incident, respectively. The men were charged with first-degree murder and robbery.
Payne v. Tennessee, 501 U.S. 808 (1991), was a United States Supreme Court case which held that testimony in the form of a victim impact statement is admissible during the sentencing phase of a trial and, in death penalty cases, does not violate the Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause of the Eighth Amendment. Payne narrowed two of the Courts' precedents: Booth v. Maryland (1987) and South Carolina v. Gathers (1989).
Phillup Alan "Sonny" Partin is an American convicted murderer currently on Florida death row at Union Correctional Institution. Partin was sentenced to death by a 9–3 vote in favor of the sentence by a jury on December 1, 2008, for the July 31, 2002 murder of 16-year-old hitchhiker Joshan Ashbrook.
Capital punishment is a legal penalty in the U.S. state of Florida.
James Michael Randall is an American criminal whose convictions include multiple rapes, a kidnapping, and the murder of two women in the Tampa Bay Area in Florida in the 1990s. Randall is currently an inmate in the Charlotte Correctional Institute serving out two life sentences. He has been described as a "notorious criminal".
Curtis Giovanni Flowers is an American man who was tried for murder six times in the U.S. state of Mississippi. Four of the trials resulted in convictions, all of which were overturned on appeal. Flowers was alleged to have committed the July 16, 1996, shooting deaths of four people inside Tardy Furniture store in Winona, seat of Montgomery County. Flowers was first convicted in 1997; in five of the six trials, the prosecutor, Montgomery County District Attorney Doug Evans, sought the death penalty against Flowers. As a result, Flowers was held on death row at the Parchman division of Mississippi State Penitentiary for over 20 years.
Gary Ray Bowles was an American serial killer who was executed in 2019 for the murders of six men in 1994. He is sometimes referred to as The I-95 Killer since most of his victims lived close to the Interstate 95 highway.
On November 23, 2012, Jordan Davis, a black 17-year-old high-school student, was murdered at a Gate Petroleum gas station in Jacksonville, Florida, by Michael David Dunn, a white 45-year-old software developer, following an argument over loud music played by Davis and his three friends, in what was believed to be a racially motivated shooting.
The Tommy Zeigler case refers to the murders of four people in Winter Garden, Florida on December 24, 1975. Thirty-year-old Tommy Zeigler was charged for the quadruple murder of his wife, her parents, and another man at his family-owned furniture store. He was tried and convicted on July 2, 1976. Zeigler was sentenced to death on July 16, 1976, for two of the murders, in addition to life imprisonment.
Wayne Charles Doty is an American double murderer currently on death row for the May 17, 2011 murder of 21-year-old fellow inmate Xavier Rodriguez.
Dontae Rashawn Morris is an American serial killer who shot and killed five people in Tampa between May and June 2010. He was initially sentenced to three death sentences in two cases. After a 2016 change in Florida law requiring a jury to recommend death unanimously, Morris appealed all of his death penalty verdicts. In case 2010-CF-10203A, the murder of Tampa Police officers David Curtis and Jeffrey Kocab, the jury had returned a unanimous verdict recommending death. As such, in 2021, the Florida Supreme Court affirmed his sentence of death in that case. In 2010-CF-10373, the murder of Derek Anderson, death was recommended by a majority, rather than unanimously. In 2021, Morris appealed and instead of retrying the case, State Attorney Andrew Warren elected to agree to re-sentencing Morris to life in prison on that case. Morris is also sentence to life in prison for the murder of Rodney Jones.
Howard Monteville Neal is an American murderer and self-confessed serial killer. Convicted and sentenced to death for killing his half-brother and two nieces in Arm, Mississippi in 1981, his sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment after it was concluded that Neal was intellectually disabled.
Mark James Asay was an American spree killer who was executed by the state of Florida for the 1987 racially motivated murders of two men in Jacksonville, Florida. He was convicted, sentenced to death, and subsequently executed in 2017 at Florida State Prison by lethal injection. Asay's execution generated attention as it was noted by multiple news agencies that he was the first white person to be executed in Florida for killing a black person. He was also the first person to be executed in the United States using the drug etomidate.
Donald Arthur Piper is an American murderer and suspected serial killer convicted of killing two women in hotels around West Des Moines and Clive, Iowa in 1993 and 1997, but is considered a suspect in four other killings. For his confirmed crimes, Piper was convicted and sentenced to two life terms.
Robert Dale Henderson was an American spree killer. He murdered at least twelve victims.
Edward Castro was an American serial killer. An unemployed drifter from California, Castro fatally stabbed three men across Florida between 1986 and 1987. Tried for two of the murders, he was given a life sentence for one of them and sentenced to death for the other. He waived all of his appeals and dropped his defense team to advocate for his own execution. Castro was executed at Florida State Prison by lethal injection in 2000.
