US breaks execution record with 37 this year, 14 in Florida

Miami.- With 37 executions so far in 2025, the United States surpassed the figures of 2014 this Tuesday, with Florida leading the rebound with 14 deaths, its highest number in decades.

Florida today applied the death penalty to Samuel Smithers, convicted of the 1996 murder of two women he paid for sexual relations, while Missouri executed Lance Shockley, 48, for the 2005 murder of a sergeant.

Smithers, 72, was executed at Florida State Prison in Raiford by lethal injection, the Florida Department of Corrections reported.

Since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, Florida had not exceeded eight executions in a single year, a figure it reached in 2014.

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Texas follows, with five executions, South Carolina and Alabama with four executions each, amid a general rebound in the use of the death penalty in the U.S., after several years with less frequent executions, according to data from the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC).

For this year, at least nine more executions are scheduled in the country, including inmates Norman Grim (October 29) and Bryan Jennings (November 13), both convicted of murder in Florida.

Meanwhile, although the state of Ohio, unlike the rest, has already issued execution orders for the next three years, with 27 scheduled, its governor, Republican Mike DeWine, indicated that they will not be carried out unless a new method is adopted, qualifying in 2020 the lethal injection as “impossible from a practical point of view.”