RAIFORD, Fla. – A Florida man who has spent more than three decades awaiting execution for the 1990 murder of his neighbor is scheduled to receive a lethal injection at the state’s Raiford prison on Tuesday, marking one of a growing number of executions carried out across the United States in recent years.
Chadwick Willacy, 58, was convicted and sentenced to death in 1991 for the killing of 56-year-old Marlys Sather during a home burglary at Sather’s property. His 35-year stint on Death Row places him among the longest-serving inmates awaiting capital punishment in the state.
Willacy’s upcoming execution will be the seventh carried out across the U.S. in 2026 to date. Of those seven, four have taken place in Florida alone, with two more in Texas and one in Oklahoma, according to data collected on national capital punishment usage.
Last year, the U.S. recorded 47 executions nationwide, the highest annual number recorded since 2009, when 52 inmates were put to death. Florida led all states in 2025 with 19 executions, far outpacing the next highest: Alabama, South Carolina, and Texas each carried out five executions over the same 12-month period.
Lethal injection remains the most common method of execution nationwide, accounting for 39 of last year’s 47 executions. Three inmates were executed by firing squad, while five were killed via nitrogen hypoxia, a relatively new method that pumps pure nitrogen gas into a sealed face mask to cause suffocation.
Nitrogen hypoxia has faced widespread international condemnation, with United Nations human rights experts labeling the practice cruel, inhumane, and a violation of basic human rights standards. Despite this criticism, a growing number of U.S. death penalty states have adopted the method as an alternative when lethal injection drugs are difficult to source.
Capital punishment remains a deeply divided policy issue across the U.S. To date, 23 of the country’s 50 states have abolished the death penalty entirely, and three additional states – California, Oregon, and Pennsylvania – maintain formal moratoriums halting all executions. However, capital punishment retains strong support among conservative political circles: former President and current 2024 presidential candidate Donald Trump has repeatedly positioned himself as a vocal backer of the death penalty, and has publicly called for expanding its use to target what he describes as “the vilest crimes.”
The upcoming execution of Willacy comes as conservative-led state legislatures in a number of death penalty states have pushed to speed up execution timelines and expand the list of crimes eligible for capital punishment, reversing decades of gradual decline in the use of the practice nationwide.