Florida on Wednesday carried out its 12th execution of the year, authorities said, with David Pittman, 63, dying by lethal injection at a state prison near Starke after more than three decades on death row. Pittman, who had pursued multiple appeals, spent his final hours with a single unidentified visitor and ate a last meal described in state records as southern comfort fare — fried chicken, steak and biscuits — before the drugs took effect.
Pittman was convicted in 1991 of murdering his wife's immediate family during a contentious 1990 divorce. Prosecutors said he stabbed the wife's parents to death, then killed their 21-year-old daughter and set the home on fire, fleeing in the slain daughter's car, which investigators later found burned. A witness identified Pittman as the man seen sprinting away from the burning car, while a jailhouse informant testified Pittman had admitted involvement. The jury, in a 9-3 vote, sentenced him to death on three counts of first-degree murder plus arson and grand theft. The execution occurred a day after his appeals, including a request for a stay, were denied by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Pittman’s lawyers argued that he had intellectual disabilities that should bar capital punishment, citing a low IQ in the low 70s and asserting he was not adequately competent at the time of his trial. They contended that executing someone with significant mental impairment would violate the Constitution’s protections against cruel and unusual punishment. State prosecutors countered that the claim was meritless and that Pittman was not intellectually disabled when he murdered the three victims or at the time of trial, noting extensive trial testimony and evidence presented decades ago. The dispute over his cognitive capacity reflects a broader, long-running debate over how best to evaluate intellectual disability in capital cases, a process that has repeatedly shaped Florida’s death penalty appeals.
Florida’s lethal injection protocol, which the Department of Corrections says uses a sedative, a paralytic and a drug that stops the heart, has drawn scrutiny amid drug shortages and supply-chain challenges. In recent years, some states have explored nitrogen hypoxia as an alternative method, but Florida has not adopted it. Nitrogen hypoxia, which entails filling a cell with pure nitrogen gas to induce suffocation, is legal in Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi but remains unapproved in Florida as a method of execution.
The Pittman execution adds to Florida’s tally of state-sanctioned killings this year, a pace that has drawn national attention as lawmakers debate the death penalty and the mechanics of carrying it out. Earlier this year, Florida executed Curtis Windom, 59, in August for a 1992 triple homicide. A separate case on the calendar lists Victor Jones, 64, scheduled for Sept. 30 for the killing of a married couple during an armed robbery in 1990. Advocates on both sides of the issue have pressed for clarity on standards for mental competence, the availability of execution drugs and the fate of the state's death penalty.
The ongoing executions come as national discussions about capital punishment continue, with supporters arguing that the death penalty ensures justice for victims and their families, while opponents caution against irreversible mistakes and urge alternatives such as life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. Florida remains a focal point of those debates, given its historically high number of annual executions and its role in shaping legal challenges surrounding capital punishment.
As Pittman’s case closes on the shelves of Florida’s death-penalty docket, the state’s policy trajectory and the justice system’s handling of appeals and cognitive-impairment claims will persist as factors in the broader national conversation about whether and how the ultimate sentence should be carried out.