Tonight, We the People of the State of Florida executed Bryan Frederick Jennings for the 1979 murder of Rebecca Kunash. Bryan was the sixth veteran executed this year in Florida — a 66-year-old U.S. Marine Corps veteran who spent nearly fifty years on death row. Florida killed him just two days after Veterans Day, and decades after abandoning its legal and moral responsibilities to him.
Rebecca Kunash’s murder was undoubtedly a devastating act. But nothing about Bryan’s execution tonight honors her memory or protects the people of this state. Instead, his execution exposes the truth of a reactive administration that selects who lives and dies based on political opportunity.
Unlike in most execution states, the governor of Florida has the sole discretion on whether or when to set a person for execution. The decision-making process is conducted entirely in secret. Under the law, the governor is supposed to review each case for clemency before signing off on the state-sanctioned killing. To date, every person executed under Governor DeSantis has at least had a clemency hearing in this century. However, no governor since 1988 has formally reviewed Bryan’s case for clemency, which would include evidence of his growth and redemption in the intervening 37 years. So, why was Bryan chosen?
On October 9, 2025, Florida officials were publicly engaging in a national media controversy involving a separate murder case in Kentucky. Several news outlets reported on the case of Ronald Exantus, a man who had been found not guilty by reason of insanity for the murder of a six-year-old child. He was convicted of assault charges against other members of the child’s family and sentenced to prison. After his release, Exantus moved to Florida to serve his reentry supervision period. Just over a week after his arrival, he was arrested for failing to register as a convicted felon within the first 48 hours of his entering the state, sparking outrage among commentators who accused Kentucky officials of being “soft on crime.”
That same day, Florida officials willingly and publicly amplified the outrage. The Florida Department of Corrections’ official X (Twitter) account went so far as to offer their three-drug execution cocktail to Kentucky, posting that “[i]n Florida, convicted child killers won’ t see the light of day. We have a three drug cocktail that Kentucky is free to borrow to finish the job.”
Governor DeSantis posted that it was “[u]nbelievable that this scum bag was let out of prison in Kentucky after serving a mere fraction of his sentence for murdering a six-year-old. Don’t mess with the Free State of Florida.”
Less than twenty-four hours later, on October 10, Governor DeSantis signed Bryan’s death warrant for the 1979 murder of six-year-old Rebecca Kunash. Bryan was just 20 years old when he was arrested for her murder, and his multiple trials were rife with constitutional errors, snitch testimony, allegations of prosecutorial misconduct, and non-unanimous juries.
Even more troubling, Bryan was the second person in a row to have a death warrant signed while he lacked state-appointed counsel. Bryan had been without state counsel for more than three years after his previous lawyer died in 2022 — a direct violation of Florida law requiring continuous representation for death-sentenced individuals.
The only logical conclusion is that after nearly half a century of indifference, Florida suddenly rushed to kill him because of a convenient political subplot.
We grieve for Rebecca and the people who loved her. We grieve for Bryan and the people who loved him. We grieve for yet another veteran executed in our names.
Florida’s death penalty system has become unrecognizable from the one the law promises. Bryan Jennings was left without a state court lawyer for years, denied a clemency review in this century, and then selected for execution because of favorable political timing. This kind of reactive lawlessness has no place in the “Free State of Florida.”
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FADP is a Florida-based, statewide organization of individuals and groups working together to end the death penalty in Florida. Our network includes dozens of state and local groups and thousands of individual Floridians, including murder victims’ family members and other survivors of violent crime, law enforcement professionals, families of the incarcerated, and death row exonerees.