Florida's 18th Execution This Year, and More Than Half of the U.S. Total
Florida carried out its 18th execution of the year on Tuesday. William Reaves, 77, was pronounced dead at 6:12 p.m. following a three-drug injection at Florida State Prison near Starke; he had been convicted of first-degree murder in the September 1986 shooting death of Indian River County sheriff's deputy Richard Raczkoski.
Florida has accounted for more than half of the 32 U.S. executions carried out so far in 2026, Reaves included. The pace has been striking before now: in July the state executed two prisoners in one day, becoming the first state in nearly a decade to do so.
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The politics sit on top of the arithmetic. That 18th execution of the year came under Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, whose use of the death penalty has been aggressive in his final term — final being the operative word for anyone counting.
The count is the easy part. Reaves' attorneys argued that the jurors who recommended death were never told the Department of Veterans Affairs had rated the Army veteran 100 percent disabled for post-traumatic stress disorder from his Vietnam service, and more than 100 veterans signed a letter asking DeSantis to halt the execution. A jury recommending death without the defendant's documented service injuries in front of it is a harder fact than any tally.