U.S. Army Veteran Richard Randolph (Malik Abdul-Sajjad) is scheduled to be executed on November 20 at 6 pm for the 1988 murder of Minnie Ruth McCollum. If the execution proceeds, it will be the 17th to take place in Florida this year. Governor DeSantis has already presided over an unprecedented number of executions — more than any Florida governor in modern history. This killing spree does not make us safer; it only deepens the cycle of harm.
After graduating high school, Malik enlisted in the U.S. Army, where he served his country honorably. It was there that he first turned to drugs — self-medicating untreated trauma that the military failed to address. His addiction only deepened after discharge, resulting in a drug dependency that shaped the tragedy for which he was sentenced to death.
The jury that recommended his execution did so by a narrow 8–4 vote, after hearing only one witness. Less than ten years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court told Florida that this practice of non-unanimous jury sentencing violates the Constitution. Instead of fixing that injustice, Florida’s leaders brought it back.
Newly discovered evidence shows that Malik was not unwanted, as he was led to believe his whole life. His birth mother, a 17-year-old girl at the time of his adoption, spent fifty years searching for him. That truth, hidden from him for decades, fundamentally changes how any fair-minded juror would have understood his life story and the trauma that shaped it.
No court or jury has ever heard this evidence — evidence that would absolutely have changed how jurors weighed his trauma, mental illness, and humanity. Life without parole is the just and lawful alternative. Florida should not execute a veteran with lifelong mental illness and trauma, especially under a sentencing scheme that violates the clear guidance of the U.S. Supreme Court.
Malik’s life story reveals everything wrong with this system: a man born into violence, shaped by trauma, abandoned by the institutions meant to help him, and now condemned by a state that refuses to hear new evidence of truth and mercy.