A man sentenced to capital punishment was executed Tuesday in Florida, in the southern United States, bringing the number of executions in the country for the start of the year, the highest total in a decade.
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Michael Bell, 54, was executed by lethal injection to the Raiford state penitentiary, at 6:25 p.m. locals (10:25 p.m. GMT), announced the prison administration of Florida.
He had been sentenced to capital punishment for the murder in 1993 of Jimmy West, 23, and Tamecka Smith, 18, in Jacksonville. This murder was motivated by his desire to take revenge on the murderer of his brother, Theodore Wright, but he had mistakenly killed his brother and a young girl who accompanied him.
Michael Bell is one of the thirty death sentences spent in their youth by the infamous correction house Florida School of Boys, nicknamed Dozier.
The establishment, where acts of cruelty were common, closed in 2011 after more than a century of activity, inspired the novel “The Nickel Boys” of the African-American writer Colson Whitehead, awarded in 2020 by the Pulitzer Prize. In 2016 anthropologists discovered the remains of 55 anonymous burials.
AFP
This is the 26th execution in the United States since the start of the year-including eight for Florida alone-a record since the 28 recorded in 2015. Nine others are currently still planned in 2025.
“The increase in executions this year is the result of the decisions of some officials elected in a small number of states,” explains in a report published last week the specialized observatory Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC).
These executions are “very concentrated geographically”, more than half divided between Florida, Texas and South Carolina, he underlines.
Out of 26 executions this year, 21 were carried out by lethal injection.
Three was by inhalation of nitrogen, a method used for the first time in the world by Alabama in 2024 and compared by UN experts to a form of “torture” and two by execution platoon in South Carolina, for the first time in the United States since 2010.
The death penalty was abolished in 23 of the 50 American states. Three others, California, Oregon and Pennsylvania, observe a moratorium of the governor’s decision -making executions.
