This July marks the 50th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Gregg v. Georgia, which reinstated the death penalty, making it a defining feature of the American criminal justice system. But capital punishment has since lost its hold on the political imagination, with executions persisting in only a small number of states, including Texas, Oklahoma, Alabama and Missouri.
That retreat from capital punishment is apparent in governors’ offices across the country. In 2000, Gov. George Ryan of Illinois, a Republican, declared a moratorium on executions, after the exoneration of 13 men who had been on death row; before leaving office, he commuted nearly all death sentences in the state to life in prison. More recently, Democrats like Gov. Gavin Newsom of California and Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania imposed or maintained moratoriums. In June, Ohio’s governor, Mike DeWine, a Republican and a former prosecutor who helped write his state’s death penalty statute, called for abolishing capital punishment there, concluding that it did not deter murder and abandoning his belief that it was morally justified.
President Trump, by contrast, has long been one of the death penalty’s most outspoken champions, making it a cornerstone of his law-and-order agenda. He resumed federal executions in 2020, ending a 17-year hiatus and reviving a punishment that had become an increasingly rare exercise of federal power. Before Trump took office, the federal government had executed just three people since 1963; in the final six months of his first term, it executed 13. He returned to the issue repeatedly on the 2024 campaign trail, calling for broadening the categories of crimes eligible for execution by proposing death sentences for drug dealers, human traffickers and migrants who kill American citizens.
Hours after taking office in January 2025, he signed a sweeping executive order titled “Restoring the Death Penalty and Protecting Public Safety” — signaling that the White House intended to put the full weight of the federal government behind the revival of capital punishment. He instructed the attorney general to pursue death sentences more aggressively; called on the Justice Department to challenge Supreme Court decisions limiting the death penalty; directed federal officials to help states obtain the increasingly scarce lethal injection drugs needed to carry out executions; and encouraged state prosecutors to seek capital punishment more often.
Nowhere has the president’s vision been pursued more relentlessly than in Florida, thanks to an unusual concentration of power in the governor’s office. In most states that still carry out executions, the process follows a familiar legal path: Once a condemned prisoner has exhausted his appeals, courts — not governors — set execution dates. In Florida, however, the decision rests entirely with the governor, who decides whether — and when — to sign a death warrant for one of the state’s eligible prisoners.