Tonight, We, the People of the State of Florida, executed Ronald “Ronnie” Heath for the 1989 murder of Michael Sheridan, marking the first execution of the year and continuing an execution spree that remains politicized, frantic, and disproportionate.
Ronnie was put to death for a murder he did not commit. The undisputed trigger man in that crime, Ronnie’s brother Kenneth, received a life sentence with the possibility of parole. That means one day Kenneth may walk free on this earth, while Ronnie will be buried six feet under it.
Like many facing execution, Ronnie’s life tells a truth Florida refuses to confront. As a teenager, he was sent to a Florida adult prison, where he was repeatedly abused. The crime that sent him to prison as a teenager was the second-degree murder of Michael Green, who Ronnie maintains he killed in self defense. Florida released him at 27 with no support, no treatment, and no resources and later acted shocked when he fell back into the cycle of violence.
This execution also forces an uncomfortable truth into the open: Not all victims are treated equally. Political pressure, optics, and lobbying dictate who lives and dies. Pain is ranked. Grief is weaponized. Families are manipulated and then discarded.
Florida is unique among death penalty states in that the governor alone decides who lives or dies — and when. That unchecked power has warped the entire process, leaving grieving families to believe they must fight for attention in order to be seen, heard, or honored. Under this administration’s execution spree, many victims’ families have been led to believe that justice — and even peace — will only come if their loved one’s case is selected next.
In Ronnie Heath’s case, family members of the victims sent a case of custom blue Sharpies to the governor, hoping to draw his attention and prompt the signing of a death warrant. This is not because those families are cruel or vindictive, but because they have been taught that this is how justice works in Florida. The governor has openly embraced the symbolism of his blue Sharpie, even tossing it into a crowd after signing pro–death penalty legislation.
When state killing is treated as spectacle, families are left feeling they must participate in that spectacle simply to be acknowledged. We understand the profound pain that drives this desperation. Many victims’ families are effectively held hostage by a system that tells them closure, dignity, and peace will only come through execution — even as experience shows that killing another human being rarely brings the healing they were promised. This is yet another way the death penalty causes harm. It retraumatizes families, distorts grief, and reduces the most solemn exercise of state power to a competition for attention. That damage belongs to the system — not to the families it has misled.
If 2026 matches the death toll of 2025, these rushed executions also bring a greater risk of a botched execution. The litigation beginning last year in Frank Walls’ case and continuing this year with the case of Ronnie Heath demonstrates one of two things: Florida is either lying about how it is administering its lethal injection protocol or it is abysmally inept at recordkeeping. Or both. Either way, the risk of torture is paramount.
We grieve for Michael Sheridan, the victim for which this death sentence is being carried out. We grieve for the other families, both named and unnamed, who feel Ronnie is the cause of their pain. We grieve for Ronnie’s mother, who will have to continue living without her son.
In nearly every letter he wrote while on death watch, Ronnie asks the same thing: “please look after my mother.” Even as his own life is being taken from him, his concern remains fixed on hers. The State may have ended Ronnie’s life, but it cannot erase the love of a son.
Tonight, Florida killed a man for a death he did not cause and in doing so created several more murder victims’ family members. And these new victims will never see their loved one’s killer brought to “justice.”
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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.