TALLAHASSEE, Fla. – A Florida bill making its way through the Legislature this month could change how the state implements executions.
The bill (SB 1604) was filed late last month, and it seeks to amend multiple state laws relating to corrections, including prepayment court costs, statutes of limitations on prisoner lawsuits, and location tracking for inmates.
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However, one of the more prominent issues tackled by the bill is the death penalty.
Under current law, a death sentence carried out in Florida must be performed via either electrocution or lethal injection. The choice of which is left up to the prisoner being executed.
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However, SB 1604 would expand those methods to include anything “not deemed unconstitutional.”
While lethal injection would still be the default method of execution, the bill aims to allow these other methods if the state is unable to effectively acquire the chemicals used for lethal injections.
According to Legislative analysts, the company responsible for the lethal injection drugs used in 13 federal executions back in 2020 and 2021 — Absolute Standards — announced that it will no longer produce that drug, pentobarbital.
“For more than a decade, departments of corrections across the United States have had difficulty acquiring some of the drugs traditionally used in lethal injection executions,” the analysis reads. “Many drug manufacturers have explicitly banned the use of their products in executions, and others have stopped producing these drugs completely.”
As a result, states like Idaho, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Utah and South Carolina have begun allowing the use of firing squads as a means of execution.
Earlier this month, South Carolina used a firing squad to execute an inmate — the first to die by that method in 15 years. Alabama also executed a death row inmate last year using a new execution method: suffocation via nitrogen gas.
If SB 1604 were to take effect, it would in turn add Florida to this growing list of states, allowing the use of firing squads or nitrous gas for executions unless the Supreme Court were to rule these methods unconstitutional.
During a committee meeting on Tuesday, the bill’s sponsor — Sen. Jonathan Martin (R-Ft. Myers) — said that potential shortage of lethal injection chemicals could cause issues in the future when meting out executions.
“There could be a point in the future where there’s a shortage of those chemicals, but we want to make sure that any executions that are fulfilling the governor’s orders, a jury, a judge, that there are constitutional ways (of executing inmates) out there,” he said.
Board Secretary Grace Hanna at the FADP spoke out against the proposal during that meeting, claiming that the bill would unduly expand the range of execution options.
“This legislation seeks to expand Florida’s execution method without providing any concrete information on the execution methods that would be used,” Hanna said. “This legislation opens the door for the state to use any execution method on which the court has not weighed.”
Despite the objection, the bill was ultimately approved by a committee vote of 5-2. It now faces consideration from two more committees before it can go to the full Senate for a vote.
But if the bill is approved and signed into law, it will take effect on July 1.
