Opinion: Florida's Record Pace of Executions Is Outrunning the Appeals Process

Barring a late stay, Florida is scheduled to execute William Reaves by lethal injection on October 20 at Florida State Prison in Starke. He is 77 years old. He is also a combat veteran of the Vietnam War, and the question of what his service did to him, and what his trial jury was never told about it, has outlived nearly every other participant in his case.

Reaves shot and killed Indian River County Sheriff's Deputy Richard Raczkoski outside a convenience store near Vero Beach in 1986. A jury convicted him of first-degree murder in a 1992 retrial and recommended a death sentence by a vote of ten to two, according to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit's 2017 opinion in his case. Under Florida's current death-penalty statute, a jury does not need to agree unanimously to recommend death; eight of twelve votes suffice. Florida is one of the only capital-punishment states that allows a death sentence without a unanimous jury recommendation, which means a split verdict that would end in a life sentence in most of the country can still end in an execution in Florida.

Governor Ron DeSantis signed Reaves's death warrant in September, his 18th of the year, according to local reporting on the warrant. If the execution proceeds, it will be Florida's 18th this year, matching a scale of capital punishment the state had not approached before 2025, when it carried out 19 executions, the most in a single year since Florida reinstated the death penalty. The Death Penalty Information Center counted 17 executions in Florida through mid-October, out of 31 nationwide, meaning more than half of all executions carried out in the United States this year have happened in one state.

The evidence the jury never heard

The pace matters because of how long Reaves's case took to work through, and what that process did and did not surface. According to the Eleventh Circuit's own recounting of the record, Reaves arrived in Vietnam in 1969 at age 20 and served with the Army's Fourth Infantry Division. His trial lawyer, who had never handled a capital case, did not have Reaves's mental health properly evaluated before trial and did not give his own defense expert the military records needed to support a diagnosis; that expert ended up testifying only about an undefined "Vietnam syndrome," and the trial court barred more specific psychiatric evidence from the jury's consideration of the shooting itself.

Years later, at a three-day evidentiary hearing ordered on a different claim, Reaves's lawyers called six expert witnesses, doctors in addictionology, psychology, neuropsychology and psychiatry, who testified that he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, polysubstance abuse and brain damage connected to his military service and drug use, the appeals court's opinion recounts. By then the record also contained a U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs finding that Reaves was 100 percent disabled due to PTSD related to his military service. None of that was in front of the jury that voted 10-2 for death in 1992.

In 2015, U.S. District Judge Donald Middlebrooks vacated Reaves's death sentence, finding his trial counsel constitutionally ineffective for failing to investigate and present the PTSD evidence, a ruling that found, in substance, that a defendant facing execution was entitled to competent representation and that Reaves had not received it.

A procedural wall, not a decision on the merits

The Eleventh Circuit reversed Middlebrooks in 2017 and reinstated the death sentence, not because it disagreed that the PTSD evidence mattered, but on narrower procedural grounds tied to which claims Reaves had preserved and how they moved through state court before reaching federal habeas review. Federal habeas law, codified at 28 U.S.C. § 2254, generally bars a federal court from granting relief on a claim unless the state court's own adjudication was contrary to, or an unreasonable application of, clearly established federal law, a standard built for finality, not for re-litigating sentencing on the merits.

That distinction is the crux of what should trouble readers regardless of where they stand on capital punishment itself. A federal district judge, after reviewing the full record, concluded that Reaves's jury made its 10-2 recommendation without hearing evidence a combat psychiatrist, a VA disability finding and five other experts would later treat as central to understanding what happened outside that convenience store. The appeals court did not rule that evidence immaterial. It ruled that a procedural doctrine, designed to keep federal courts from endlessly second-guessing state convictions, closed off the chance to weigh it at all.

There is a reasonable case for finality rules in capital litigation, which can otherwise stretch for decades, as Reaves's did. But finality rules were not written to resolve the empirical question of what a jury would have done with better information; they were written to allocate which court gets to ask that question, and when. When a state is executing people at the pace Florida is executing them in 2026, on track to rival or exceed its own record from the year before, the margin for a case like Reaves's to work its way through every available procedural door before a warrant is signed narrows accordingly. The warrant, once signed in Florida, generally sets an execution date roughly 30 days out, a compressed window that was not designed with cases carrying this much unresolved factual dispute in mind.

None of this requires taking a position on whether Reaves deserved a death sentence, or on capital punishment generally, to find the sequence disquieting: a trial jury split 10-2 without full information, a federal judge later finding the missing information was constitutionally significant, and an appeals panel concluding it lacked the authority to act on that finding, all before a state moving through warrants faster than it ever has sends the case to its conclusion. A functioning appellate system is supposed to catch cases like this before the clock runs out, not race the clock itself.