US reaches 10-year high for executions as Florida puts inmate to death for double murder

USA Today

4 days ago

With Michael Bell's death in Florida on Tuesday, the U.S. has now executed more inmates than any given year since 2015. At least nine more inmates are set for execution this year.
Florida has executed death row inmate Michael Bernard Bell, marking a 10-year high for executions in the U.S.
Bell was executed on Tuesday, July 15, for the revenge killings of 23-year-old Jimmy West and 18-year-old Tamecka Smith outside a Jacksonville bar on Dec. 9, 1993, when Bell went on a rampage with an AK-47.
Bell, who was pronounced dead at 6:25 p.m. ET, became the 26th inmate executed in the U.S. this year, eclipsing the 25 executions conducted in the nation during all of last year. The U.S. also has now had more executions in any given year in the U.S. since 2015, when there were 28.
'We're in the midst of something historic,' Robert Dunham, director of the Death Penalty Policy Project, told USA TODAY.
Another nine executions are scheduled this year, with more expected to be added to the calendar.
Not only is the nation seeing a rise in executions, but so is Florida. Bell's execution marked the eighth in the state this year, which has only happened twice in the last five decades: in 1984 and 2014. The state has another execution later this month, meaning the state will hit a record if it moves forward.
Here's what happened during Tuesday's execution and what you need to know about the rising numbers in Florida and the U.S.
What was Michael Bell convicted of?
In June 1993, a man named Theodore Wright killed Michael Bell's brother in self-defense. Afterward, Bell broadcast his plans for revenge, even saying: "Wright belongs in the morgue," according to court records.
Almost six months later, Bell spotted what he thought was Wright's distinctive yellow Plymouth Fury outside a Jacksonville bar. But Wright had sold his car to his half-brother, 23-year-old Jimmy West.
West left the bar with 18-year-old Tamecka Smith and another woman. As they were getting into the car, Bell used an AK-47 to spray the group with bullets and then fired on people nearby, according to court records. Though Bell didn't realize West had bought the car, he recognized him as Wright's brother before he opened fire and proceeded anyway, court records say.
Bell later told his aunt: "Theodore got my brother and now I got his brother," court records say.
At trial, Judge R. Hudson Olliff lamented how Bell received early release from prison three separate times before West's and Smith's murders, including once for an armed robbery, following years of repeated arrests and convictions.
"Seven months after that early release the defendant committed this savage double murder of an innocent 23-year-old man and a teenaged girl," Olliff said during Bell's sentencing. "These two murders can be laid at the doorstep of the Florida Parole Commission for the irresponsible early prison release of this violent habitual criminal who should have been in prison at the time the murders were committed."
Olliff said the murders "were cold and calculated and with heightened premeditation."
Bell's attorneys fought to win him a reprieve but were unsuccessful. Most recently, the Florida Supreme Court rejected arguments that witnesses who helped convict Bell wanted to recant their testimony, with the justices citing the "overwhelming evidence" in the case.
Why are executions on the rise?
After Tuesday's execution, at least nine more inmates are set to be executed by the end of the year. If they all proceed, that would mean at least 35 executions this year − a 40% increase over last year. Though it would still be a far cry from the busiest execution year ever in the U.S. − 98 in 1999 − the stage is set for the nation to reverse a long-term downward trend.
Some experts say the current political climate in the U.S. and a conservative-leaning U.S. Supreme Court is driving the increasing execution numbers, according to interviews conducted by USA TODAY with a half dozen experts and a Republican lawmaker in Florida who has has been pushing pro-death penalty legislation.
The U.S. Supreme Court − shaped by three conservative appointments made by President Donald Trump during his first term in office − has proved far less likely to issue stays of execution than previous courts, they say.
'I think that President Trump has had a bigger impact on the death penalty than he might even realize,' Frank Baumgartner, a death penalty researcher and political science professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told USA TODAY.
'No defense attorney wants to bring their case in front of the Supreme Court," he continued. "It's very hostile territory."
Dunham pointed to a spree of 13 federal executions during the last six months of Trump's first term in office. At the time, he said, the new Supreme Court 'went out of its way to lift stays of execution that were granted by lower federal court judges.'
What's going on in Florida?
Florida has executed more inmates than any other state this year, with eight already carried out and another scheduled for July 31.
Florida state Rep. Berny Jacques, a Republican who has spearheaded multiple recent pieces of successful pro-death penalty legislation in his state, chalked up this year's increases to "the political environment not only in our state but nationwide."
"You have a president who won in such strong fashion. Certainly his messaging and the policies he ran on resonate with the American people at large," he said. "There is a renewed interest in law and order ... and you're seeing that filter up to the elected officials and the executives that want to pursue tough-on-crime, law-and-order policies."
He continued: "State officials are taking their cues. This is what the people want."
Jacques pointed to the social unrest in the U.S. in the wake of George Floyd's death at the hands of police in 2020, and recent ongoing immigration protests taking place in the U.S., saying a lot of Americans are frustrated with "rioting in the streets" and want leaders to be tougher on crime.
Among the pro-death penalty legislation that Jacques proposed this year is House Bill 903. Signed by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis in May and effective on July 1, the law expands the state's options for execution methods from lethal injection and the electric chair to other methods.
'The bill doesn't call for any particular method as long as a method is not deemed unconstitutional. Everything's on the table," Jacques said. "The department of corrections could pick something other states are currently doing or another method that I can't really conceive of now."
Jacques also spearheaded a law this year expanding the death penalty to be used for a crime that doesn't involve murder: the sexual trafficking of children under 12 or of people who are mentally incapacitated. It goes into effect in October.
On July 8, Tampa Pentecostal minister Demetrius Minor marched to Gov. Ron DeSantis' office in Tallahassee, carrying a letter signed by 100 Florida Christians asking him to stop the executions.
'The death penalty is not about public safety. It's about power," Minor told the Tallahassee Democrat, part of the USA TODAY Network. "The governor alone decides who lives, who dies with no checks or balances. That is not justice. That's what we call vengeance and it's very dangerous."
When asked for comment, the governor's office pointed to DeSantis' thoughts on the issue in May, when he said that he signs death warrants to help bring closure to families who've been waiting sometimes decades for their loved one's killer to be executed.
"There are so some crimes that are just so horrific, the only appropriate punishment is the death penalty," he said, adding that there are backstops for wrongfully convicted offenders, and he supports that.
"But anytime we go forward, I'm convinced that not only was the verdict correct, but that this punishment is absolutely appropriate under the circumstances," he added.