DPI’s Podcast 12:01 The Death Penalty in Context: Florida Attorney and Researcher Melanie Kalmanson on Recent Developments in Florida’s Death Penalty

In the August 2025 episode of 12:01: The Death Penalty in Context, DPI Managing Director Anne Holsinger speaks with Melanie Kalmanson, a Florida attor­ney and author of the Substack newslet­ter Tracking Florida’s Death Penalty. Ms. Kalmanson’s newslet­ter com­piles data on leg­is­la­tion, cap­i­tal tri­als, death sen­tences, and exe­cu­tions in Florida. In the pod­cast, she dis­cuss­es how she start­ed fol­low­ing those devel­op­ments, key events in the recent his­to­ry of Florida’s death penal­ty, and why Florida has seen a sig­nif­i­cant increase in exe­cu­tions this year, even as new death sen­tences remain low. 

Florida has exe­cut­ed more peo­ple in 2025 than any oth­er state and has tied the record set for the most num­ber of exe­cu­tions in a sin­gle year. In 2023, Florida passed a new law to reduce the num­ber of jurors who must agree in order to impose a death sen­tence from 12 (unan­i­mous) to just 8. Despite that change, and in con­trast to the increase in exe­cu­tions, just two peo­ple have been sen­tenced to death so far this year. 

Florida leg­is­la­tors also passed a bill allow­ing exe­cu­tions to be per­formed by any method ​“not deemed uncon­sti­tu­tion­al.” Ms. Kalmanson says that the bill is writ­ten broad­ly as a ​“pro­phy­lac­tic mea­sure” to avoid hav­ing to re-amend the pro­to­col in the future. She notes pub­lic con­cern that the law could lead to the use of ​“very anti­quat­ed exe­cu­tion meth­ods that we cer­tain­ly in a civ­i­lized soci­ety don’t want to see.” 

In explain­ing Florida’s rate of exe­cu­tions, Ms. Kalmanson points to Governor Ron DeSantis fol­low­ing the direc­tion set by the Trump admin­is­tra­tion and Attorney General Pam Bondi, encour­ag­ing aggres­sive use of the death penal­ty. She also notes that in Florida, ​“once a pris­on­er is war­rant eli­gi­ble, it is tru­ly up to the governor’s com­plete dis­cre­tion as to when the war­rant is signed. …It’s com­plete­ly in a black box with no expla­na­tion.” In most oth­er states, courts and/​or local pros­e­cu­tors play a role in set­ting exe­cu­tion dates, but Florida’s unique dis­cre­tion and secre­cy in Florida allows the gov­er­nor to sin­gle­hand­ed­ly decide who and will be exe­cut­ed and when.