STARKE, Fla. — Tonight, We the People of the State of Florida executed Richard Knight. We executed him just hours after the State of Tennessee halted the execution of Tony Carruthers because prison personnel could not establish intravenous access – a scenario Richard’s attorneys had repeatedly warned could occur under Florida’s execution protocol. As news of Carruthers’ botched execution began to spread, Richard’s lawyers filed an emergency stay application in the Florida Supreme Court, warning that Florida’s protocol authorizes prison staff without medical training to perform invasive venous cutdown procedures without anesthesia when they cannot establish IV access. The courts declined to intervene.
We executed Richard despite the presence of unresolved forensic evidence on the murder weapon, despite an execution protocol whose dangers had been demonstrated only hours earlier, and despite the fact that he was sentenced to death under a law that the U.S. Supreme Court later ruled unconstitutional. A government willing to take a human life should be held to the highest possible standard of fairness, transparency, and human dignity. Instead, Florida moved forward with this execution under the shadow of constitutional failure and deeply troubling execution practices that no civilized society should accept without question.
At the center of this case are two lives that were stolen. Odessia Stephens and Hanessia Mullings should still be here, and the people who loved them have lived with unimaginable grief since 2000. The tragedy of their deaths deserves acknowledgment not only today, but every day that their absence continues to be felt.
But, the reality is that the State has chosen not to uncover the truth about what happened on the night they were killed. There was another person present at the crime scene, and the State fought tooth and nail to avoid spending the mere minutes necessary to run a simple fingerprint analysis that could provide clarity. Even at the very end, Florida’s courts refused to require testing that could either confirm the State’s theory or challenge it. A system that claims certainty should never be afraid of more information.
We could spend ten pages explaining the flaws in this legal case, but Richard’s legacy deserves more than a recitation of facts. His life began in abandonment and instability long before the State of Florida decided it would end in execution. Court records show that, as a toddler, Richard’s birth mother abandoned him on a bus in his native Jamaica. A stranger brought him to a police station, where he was placed into institutional care. No one knew his name or real age. He was assigned July 6, 1978 as a birthday and “Mark” as a name – placeholders for a child discarded so completely that even his identity was uncertain.
Though he was taken in by a family who raised him as their own, the initial rupture had taken hold. And the damage was compounded by the repeated repeated sexual abuse he endured at the hands of a neighbor. He developed a seizure disorder that still plagues him to this day – including while on death watch.
Despite it all, Richard has found stability and meaningful relationships on death row. He has become an artist who creates elaborate sculptures from found items and draws birthday cards for his penpals around the world. He has become a chef who frequently teaches new arrivals how to use foods from the prison canteen to create meals that remind them of home. And, on the day his death warrant was signed, he faced the possibility of his execution with a level of dignity that few could muster, writing to a friend “If anyone asks what I need, it’s prayers that if they kill me, I handle it with grace.”
The machinery of death has become so routine in Florida that Governor DeSantis, who has the sole and exclusive authority over who on death row lives or dies, did not spend his evening grappling with the irreversible power he holds, or preparing to oversee his most solemn duty. He did not spend his evening maintaining an open telephone line between the execution chamber and his office, as is required by law, or prayerfully considering whether the facts of this case warrant a grant of clemency. He did not spend his evening demonstrating his respect for life in the same way that Gov. Bill Lee of Tennessee, another ardent supporter of capital punishment, did when he granted reprieve to Tony Carruthers.
No, as the State of Florida carried out its 36th state sanctioned murder under his administration, Gov. DeSantis was in Washington D.C. serving as the keynote speaker for an event hosted by the Federalist Society.
The contrast is impossible to ignore. Richard prayed for grace. At the same moment, the governor who personally set his execution date stood at a podium advancing his political stature. Richard Knight’s death unfolded not as a solemn exercise of justice, but as background noise to a governor increasingly treating executions as routine instruments of political power.
The death penalty asks ordinary people to accept extraordinary things: that constitutional violations can become final, that unanswered questions can remain unanswered forever, and that human beings can be reduced to case numbers and execution dates. Tonight, Florida asked the public to accept all of those things at once. We should refuse.