Florida set to execute 13th inmate this year as state leads US in death penalty

Florida is scheduled to execute William Frances Silvia on Tuesday evening, marking the state's 13th lethal injection this year and underscoring its position as the nation's most active death chamber.

Silvia, 61, was convicted of first-degree murder for the 2006 fatal shooting of his estranged wife, Patricia Silvia, and the attempted murder of her mother, Betty Woodard. The attack occurred at Woodard's Orlando-area home during a family cookout, shortly after Silvia's attempt at reconciliation failed.

The execution is set for 6 p.m. at Florida State Prison near Starke, using a three-drug lethal injection protocol. A final appeal was still pending before the U.S. Supreme Court as of Tuesday.

Silvia was initially sentenced to death in 2008, but that sentence was later vacated following an appeal tied to Florida's death penalty sentencing procedures. He was resentenced to death in 2018 after a new penalty phase.

His attorneys had argued that the Capital Collateral Regional Counsel, the state agency providing legal representation to death row inmates, could not offer adequate assistance because it was already handling another case. The Florida Supreme Court rejected that appeal.

Florida has carried out more than half of the 22 executions recorded nationwide so far in 2026. The state's aggressive pace follows a record-setting 2025, when it conducted 19 executions, the most since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976.

In July, Florida executed two prisoners on the same day, the first state to do so in nearly a decade. Two more executions are scheduled for September: Harold Gene Lucas on Sept. 1, and Daniel Owen Conahan Jr. on Sept. 10.

Lucas was convicted of fatally shooting a 16-year-old girl who rejected his advances and wounding two of her friends. Conahan was convicted of kidnapping and strangling a man he had paid to pose for nude photos, and is suspected in similar homicides in southwest Florida during the 1990s.

All executions in Florida are carried out via lethal injection using a sedative, a paralytic, and a drug that stops the heart, according to the Department of Corrections.