STARKE, Fla. — Tonight, We the People of the State of Florida executed William Frances Silvia, Jr. for the 2006 murder of his estranged wife, Patricia Silvia. During the same act of violence that senselessly ended Patricia’s life and left her children traumatized, he also shot and grievously wounded his mother-in-law, Betty Woodard.

Nearly three in ten women and one in ten men will experience domestic or intimate partner violence in their lifetimes. Many will survive, but survival does not erase the physical wounds, the fear, or the grief that violence leaves behind. We mourn Patricia and the life that was taken from her. We hold Betty and all who loved them both in our hearts. We lament the devastation William caused and the suffering that continues long after a single terrible day.

And no honest account of this case can end there. It must also reckon with the severity of William’s mental illness and the depths of despair that shaped his life, his crime and, ultimately, his death.

William himself was no stranger to domestic violence. As a child, he witnessed it in his home and suffered his own physical and emotional abuse. Prior to the crime, he had a documented history of delusional thinking, paranoia, alcohol dependence, and multiple head injuries.

In the months before Patricia’s murder, he lost his job, became homeless, and experienced severe psychological deterioration. His serious mental illness was not in dispute at trial. Both state and defense experts agreed that his chronic psychological disorder was “genuinely mitigating evidence.” His jury agreed, but by a non-unanimous vote, sentenced him to death.

Condemned to die and shuffled off to death row, William gave up hope. When he met his first team of appointed postconviction lawyers, he had no desire to fight for his life. And to be honest, they did little to persuade him otherwise. They told the court that he wanted to abandon his appeals, and the court acquiesced.

This is not uncommon. Research on people who have waived legal review and allowed their executions to proceed found that nearly 90 percent had documented mental illness or severe substance use disorders.

Despite that, neither the court, the State, nor his defense demanded that a doctor evaluate him before he made such a momentous decision. Instead, there was a perfunctory hearing: a few basic questions, no meaningful advocacy by his then-lawyers, and a judicial rubber stamp sealing his fate. And that was that.

Then, in 2016, the law changed. In a case called Hurst v. Florida, the United States Supreme Court finally agreed with the argument that the capital defense community had been making for decades – a jury must be unanimous before a person can be condemned to die. Roughly 150 people on Florida’s death row received new jury sentencing trials and a second chance at life.

William should have been one of them.

His new lawyers tried. They told him about the new law, and asked a circuit court judge to set aside his earlier waiver. After all, how can someone knowingly surrender a constitutional right that did not yet exist? How could his waiver be treated as an enduring, rational choice when it came from a place of hopelessness, clouded by severe mental illness?

The judge agreed and vacated his death sentence. She said that he was entitled to the same protection as everyone else – a new sentencing proceeding where a new jury would decide whether he should be sentenced to life without parole, or, if by unanimous vote, death. For a brief moment, he had hope.

The State, eager to exact its pound of flesh on a mentally ill man, appealed. It insisted that his past waiver must bind him forever, even after the constitutional foundation beneath his death sentence had collapsed. The Florida Supreme Court agreed, with only the late Justice Fred Lewis writing in dissent. Lewis sharply criticized the reversal and warned that the Court was pushing Florida’s death penalty “into an unconstitutional abyss.” Still, the waiver William made in the haze of his disordered mind was allowed to stand, and the courthouse doors slammed shut.

The law in Florida says we can execute the mentally ill as long as they understand the very basic concept that they are about to be killed for a crime the State says they committed.  

That is how someone like William Silvia can be profoundly ill and still be executed. His mental illness could shape his childhood, distort his perception of the world, contribute to a catastrophic act of violence and cloud his decision to abandon every appeal – yet he could still be called competent to die. He could see things that weren’t there, hear things other people couldn’t hear, and still be strapped to a gurney and injected with poison.

William posed no danger to the public. He could have spent the rest of his life in prison, or, more appropriately, in a hospital. A person as ill as William needed treatment, accountability and humane confinement. None of this absolves him of Patricia’s murder, the wounds he inflicted on Betty or the pain carried by everyone whose life he changed that night.

Tonight, Florida answered the devastation of intimate partner violence with one more deliberate act of violence. Patricia, Betty, and Patricia’s children deserved better. William, profoundly ill and entirely in the State’s control, deserved better. We, the People of the State of Florida, deserved better, too.

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