Under Governor Ron DeSantis, Florida has seen an unprecedented surge in executions since 2025, accounting for a massive share of the nation's capital punishments despite a nationwide decline. This rapid acceleration has placed an immense psychological and emotional toll on prison staff, defense lawyers, and spiritual ministers like Father Dustin Feddon, who accompany the condemned in their final hours. The situation underscores the deep human costs and legal pressures of a highly politicized, opaque capital punishment system.
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### **THE GRIM REAPER’S CONVEYOR BELT!**
#### **Tallahassee Sky-Pilot Staggers Under Florida’s Ghastly Harvest of Death!**
#### **GOVERNOR’S BLUE PEN SPINS THE ROULETTE WHEEL OF DOOM WHILE THE CONDEMNED WALK THE LAST MILE IN RECORD-SHATTERING NUMBERS!**
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**STARKE, FLA. —** In the dead of night, when the law-abiding citizens of the Sunshine State are fast asleep, Father Dustin Feddon stands before his basin in the dark, splashing icy water upon his brow. His ticker is racing like a getaway car, his lungs gasping for air.
For twelve long years, this holy sky-pilot has walked the last mile with the lost souls of Union Correctional Institution, keeping their spirits afloat as the high-hat courtrooms wrangled over their fates. But today, a cold wind is blowing through the cellblocks. The grim machinery of the law has been cranked into high gear, and the state of Florida is churning out corpses at a rate that has the whole country gasping!
In the frozen days of January 2025, Governor Ron DeSantis began scratching his John Hancock on death warrants with frantic speed. What followed was a bumper crop of executions—the busiest season of the gallows this state has witnessed since the record-shattering year of 1936.
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### **A YULETIDE TRAGEDY AT THE BIG HOUSE**
The iron hand of fate squeezed tightest this winter. In November, the Governor spelled doom for Frank Walls, one of the flock under Father Feddon’s care. The guards—the heaviest bulls you ever laid eyes on—marched Walls from his old cell to the dreaded "Death Watch" at Florida State Prison. There, Walls was tossed into one of three narrow cages sitting a mere thirty feet from the execution chamber.
Just seven days before the Christmas bells were set to ring, Father Feddon sat beside the doomed man in the final room. Walls lay strapped to the gurney, his noggin freshly sheared, the poison tubes snaking into his arm. The Padre held tight to his leg as the modern poison flowed. Walls gasped, his eyes rolled back, and his body went slack.
He was the nineteenth man put to sleep in Florida that year—demolishing the state’s old 1936 record of eleven executions. In that single, bloody year, the Sunshine State accounted for a whopping forty percent of all the capital punishments in the entire U.S. of A.!
Now, the Death Watch is a roaring assembly line. Three cages, always occupied. When one fellow takes the long sleep, the next in line is shuffled one cell closer to the needle, while a fresh warrant brings another terrified soul into the vacant pen.
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### **THE FEDERAL G-MEN SOUND THE TRUMPET**
This rush to the grave comes even as the rest of the nation turns its back on the rope and the chair. Thirty-three states have put the kibosh on the extreme penalty, spooked by the high cost of trials and over two hundred exonerations since the seventies.
But Uncle Sam’s Chief in Washington, Donald Trump, is blowing a different bugle. Fresh in office in January 2025, the President signed a sweeping decree titled *"Restoring the Death Penalty,"* ordering his federal prosecutors to demand the ultimate price, challenge the high courts, and help states secure the hard-to-find sleeping potions needed to carry out the job.
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### **THE BLUE SHARPIE OF DEATH**
Nowhere is this law-and-order crusade pursued with hotter zeal than in Florida, where the Governor plays a solitary hand behind locked doors. Unlike other states where the courts set the date, here, the Governor alone holds the keys to the kingdom.
"He might as well be throwing darts at a list of names or spinning a roulette wheel," whispered Maria DeLiberato, a sharp legal eagle for the ACLU.
With no rhyme or reason to who is chosen next, the game has become a desperate scramble to stay out of the Governor’s line of sight. In one shocking twist, the kin of a traveling salesman murdered back in ’89 sent Governor DeSantis a bundle of custom blue Sharpie pens—his favorite tool for signing laws and death warrants—begging him to dispatch the killer, Ronald Heath. The trick worked; the blue ink ran, and Heath walked the plank on February 10.
When the screws come down the hall to deliver a warrant, the wings fall dead silent. "The warden is first, followed by the colonel, the major, and the captain," said John Buzia, a former death-house habitué now serving life. "They come walking down the wing with their game faces on, and you can hear the keys and the heavy boots echoing on the concrete."
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### **NO TIME FOR GRIEVING MOUTHPIECES**
For the legal defenders, life has become a dizzying race against the clock. Florida law allows a mere thirty days between the signing of a warrant and the final sleep—a far cry from the ninety days they give a man in Texas.
This breakneck pace has crushed the mouthpieces. When the Governor signed the warrant for Billy Kearse, his long-time lawyer, Paul Kalil, was grappling with his own father’s dying hours in a hospital. The stone-faced courts granted the grieving barrister a measly forty-eight hours of reprieve. Kalil’s father died on February 8, and just three weeks later, Kearse was put to death while his lawyer was still picking out a casket.
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### **A TOLL ON THE LIVING**
On April 21, the hour struck for Chadwick Willacy. Outside the iron gates of Starke, a band of quiet souls gathered under a spreading oak, ringing a heavy iron bell—*clang! clang!*—as the poison flowed. "Not in my name!" they cried.
But across the road, a lone counter-protester named Bill Campbell fired up a noisy phonograph, blaring "Another One Bites the Dust" to drown out their prayers. Willacy was pronounced dead at 6:15 PM.
Retired Warden Ron McAndrew, a veteran of the big house who once oversaw the electric chair, warned our scribes of the terrible toll this business takes on the guards. McAndrew is still haunted by the night in 1997 when Pedro Medina’s head burst into flames in the old sparky chair.
"It’s damaging—very damaging—to the people in that room," McAndrew said, recalling the years he spent hitting the Johnnie Walker bottle to drown out the ghosts sitting on the edge of his bed.
Today, Father Feddon is feeling that very same poison in his soul. On June 2, he watched Andrew Lukehart—a young fella who dreamed of walking the holy pilgrim paths of Spain—die on the gurney.
"I just keep seeing his face, and seeing it, and seeing it," the Padre whispered, his voice cracking like dry timber. "Everything makes you want to cry out to the people around you, *'Why are you making me do this?'*"
But there is no rest for the holy. Another soul, James Duckett, is waiting on a temporary stay of execution, and the high-hat prosecutors are already asking the courts to tear it up. The machinery of death is humming, and the Padre must soon pack his bag for another trip to the shadow of the gallows.