Florida to execute first inmate since 2016
Florida’s death penalty hiatus is slated to end today, when the state plans to execute the first Death Row prisoner in more than 19 months.
But the execution of Mark James Asay — a white supremacist accused of targeting black victims — won’t just be the first lethal injection since early 2016 in a state that was killing Death Row prisoners at a record-breaking pace until a U.S. Supreme Court ruling effectively put Florida’s death penalty on hold.
It will also be the first execution anywhere in the country using an untested triple-drug lethal injection procedure.
Asay has spent nearly three decades on Death Row after being convicted in the 1987 shooting deaths of two men in downtown Jacksonville.
Gov. Rick Scott initially signed a death warrant for Asay in January 2016.
But not long afterward, in a case known as Hurst v. Florida, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the state’s death-penalty sentencing system as unconstitutional because it gave too much power to judges, instead of juries.
Lawmakers revamped the law, but a series of court rulings kept the death penalty in limbo until this spring, when the Florida Supreme Court lifted a hold on Asay’s execution, more than a year after it was supposed to take place.
It’s not unusual for Death Row prisoners, especially those with pending death warrants, to launch myriad appeals in one of the judicial system’s most complicated arenas.
But Asay’s case is even more tangled than most:
Asay, now 53, spent a decade on Death Row without legal representation, a violation of state law.
Dozens of boxes of records related to his case were destroyed after being left in a rat- and roach-infested shed.
One of his previous defense lawyers was the subject of an investigation by the Florida Supreme Court, after a federal judge chided her for shoddy work.
Asay’s current lawyer maintains that Attorney General Pam Bondi’s office hoodwinked him into agreeing to a delay by the U.S. Supreme Court, which could ultimately make it more difficult for the condemned killer to have a review by the high court.