An American who was sentenced to death for a 1990 murder while on the run for a previous murder was executed in Florida on Thursday, according to authorities, a first in this Southeast state in more than three years .
Donald Dillbeck, who was killed by lethal injection Thursday night, had killed a woman in a parking lot in the state capital, Tallahassee, when he was an escaped prisoner sentenced to life in 1979 at the age of 15 for the murder of a police officer the local press.
Donald Dillbeck spent 32 years on death row, reports the Tallahassee Democrat newspaper.
The United States Supreme Court rejected it at the last minute.
The family of the 1990 victim present at the scene thanked Gov. Ron DeSantis for authorizing the execution.
On the day that Mr. DeSantis signed this executive order, the Tallahassee Demorat, the very conservative politician, also put forward the idea of facilitating death sentences by lowering the threshold of the number of votes required on a criminal jury to sentence a defendant to death .
Mr. Dillbeck, in his final words, attacked the governor, a hard-right rising star who is openly flirting with a presidential nomination in 2024.
“I know I hurt people when I was young. I really screwed it up,” he said, according to comments from the Tallahassee Democrat. “But I know Ron DeSantis was a lot worse. He took many things from many people.”
Donald Dillbeck is the seventh person to be executed in the United States since the beginning of the year, the 100th in Florida since 1976, when a brief moratorium on the death penalty ended in the United States.