STATEMENT ON THE EXECUTION OF FRANK ATHEN WALLS
Tonight, We the People of the State of Florida executed Frank Walls, a man with intellectual disability. We executed him a week before Christmas, closing out 2025 as the deadliest execution spree in Florida’s history. Frank spent 37 years on death row atoning for the murders he committed as a teenager.
Florida has now put to death nineteen people this year. Since the first execution in February, we have gathered in vigils around the state to mark the killing of a man every 16 days. Each execution represents a series of institutional decisions — by prosecutors, courts, governors, and corrections officials — made over many years, and each is connected to irreversible harm experienced by the staff required to carry out these acts, the people being executed and their loved ones, and, centrally, the victims’ families. Recognition of the decades of grief experienced by all who knew and loved the victims remains central to any accounting of this year.
The State wants you to believe that Frank is simply a monster, branded for life because of the violence he committed long before his brain was fully developed. While that narrative is politically convenient, it is also dehumanizing and false. Yes, Frank committed monstrous acts, but he is not a monster. His life story, including his nearly four decades in prison, illustrates exactly why we do not execute people with intellectual disabilities: their limitations shape their behavior and their vulnerability, and none of the purported justifications for the death penalty are satisfied by their executions.
From the moment Frank entered this world, he struggled with serious medical and cognitive issues. Frank was hypoxic at birth, and suffered from high fevers requiring multiple hospitalizations as a toddler. By the age of 5, it was clear that he had mental deficits and brain damage. He did poorly in school, he could not focus, and his impulse control was severely impaired. He survived two separate bouts of meningitis in his mid-teens that compounded his early brain damage. Frank’s middle school teacher concluded that it was “highly unlikely that Frank would ever become an individual that did not have special needs or was not disabled.”
The irony here is that no one ever contested or disputed that Frank was a child with significant disabilities and limitations. The State did not even bother to contest that fact at his original trials. His trial lawyer argued his mental disabilities as mitigation. Then, in 2001 and 2002 — the Florida legislature passed a law, and the United States Supreme Court subsequently ruled — that people with intellectual disability are barred from execution.
Suddenly, the State pretended that Frank was not a person with intellectual disability. They could have simply agreed with the well established record, and sentenced Frank to the legal alternative, life without the possibility of parole. It would have been over. No more lawyers, no more court hearings, no more dragging the Peterson, Alger, Gygi, Whiddon, and Condra families through decades of uncertainty. But once Frank’s longstanding disability served as a legal bar to his state-sanctioned murder, the State desperately started to twist the facts, minimize the overwhelming scientific evidence, and seek his execution. The State has spent the last 25 years since that Supreme Court decision battling against Frank’s documented medical diagnoses until they finally won the right to kill him tonight at untold financial and emotional costs.
As the State spent that time trying to disprove Frank’s disability so they could kill him, he chose to spend his time on death row trying to make things right. He was defined by more than his disability, and by more than his crimes. Frank spent all those years finding stability in the rhythms of life on death row. He embraced the teachings of the Catholic Church, and eagerly, with a child-like quality, shared those teachings to anyone who would listen.
Frank grew up on death row — literally and figuratively. And, as many people with developmental disabilities do, Frank flourished with the structure, predictability, and safety that should have been available to him all along. Many of his neighbors on death row have shared that Frank was gentle, vulnerable, and worthy of protection — despite the grievous harm they knew he had caused.
Frank was blessed within many penpals, who saw beyond his crimes, and shared in his faith. A long time pen friend shared these final words of goodbye to Frank, in hopes that he might know his impact. He wrote, “Your acceptance of God’s will are models for each of us trying to find our ways through life. You have changed my life, Frank. You have made me a better person. You have paid the full price for your sins and, through your prayerful efforts, have transformed your life and earned your reward in Heaven.”
Similarly, in the days leading up to his execution, Frank’s faith was unshakable, and he expressed this concrete and simple view: “Either the Lord will grant me a stay and let me live to continue to spread His Word, or the Lord will welcome me home.”
The death penalty is supposed to be reserved for the worst of the worst. Instead, tonight we executed an intellectually disabled man. A man who expressed decades of remorse and regret for his irrevocable harm. We executed a loving son, brother, and friend. We executed a man of faith who proudly shared that faith with anyone and everyone he could. Frank Walls was not an exception — he was the inevitable result of a system Florida spent all year defending, accelerating, and feeding with human lives.
History will remember who tolerated it.
###
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.