Florida carries out its 13th execution this year in US’s busiest death chamber

US supreme court declined to halt execution of William Frances Silvia, and state has two executions next month

A Florida man convicted of fatally shooting his estranged wife and wounding his mother-in-law was executed on Tuesday, continuing the state’s aggressive use of the death penalty in the final term of the Republican governor, Ron DeSantis .

William Frances Silvia, 61, was pronounced dead at 6.11pm after receiving a three-drug injection at Florida State Prison near Starke.

He is the 13th imprisoned person put to death this year in Florida, which has two more executions scheduled in September and has carried out more than half the US’s 22 executions so far in 2026.

The US supreme court on Tuesday denied a request to halt the execution.

Silvia was sentenced to death after being convicted of first-degree murder and attempted first-degree murder for the deadly 2006 attack on Patricia Silvia, along with her mother, Betty Woodard.

According to court records, Silvia purchased a shotgun that year and then went to Woodard’s Orlando-area home, where his wife had been living since their separation two months earlier. The family was in the middle of a cookout when Silvia arrived, and after an unsuccessful attempt to reconcile, authorities said Silvia retrieved the shotgun from his truck and shot the two women.

William Silvia was first sentenced to death following his 2008 trial. A court later vacated that sentence following an appeal related to Florida’s death penalty sentencing procedures, but after being granted a new death penalty phase in 2018, he was again sentenced to death.

A Florida state agency, the Capital Collateral Regional Counsel, provides legal representation to death row inmates. Silvia’s attorneys argued that the agency could not provide adequate legal assistance because it was already helping another death row inmate. The Florida supreme court rejected the appeal.

A total of 47 people were executed in the US in 2025. Florida led the way with 19, a record in the state since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976.

In July, Florida executed two prisoners in one day, the first state in nearly a decade to do so.

Two more executions are planned in Florida next month. Harold Gene Lucas, 74, is scheduled to die on 1 September, followed by Daniel Owen Conahan Jr, 72, on 10 September.