Florida is scheduled to execute Edward Zakrzewski on Thursday, which would make it the state’s ninth death penalty execution of 2025. Today’s event further highlights Florida’s status as the execution capital of the country this year. A sentencing jury had recommended capital punishment for Zakrzewski by a 7-5 vote. He confessed and had subsequently been convicted of killing his wife and two young daughters in 1994.
Zakrzewski, an Air Force veteran, carried out the murders at his family’s residence in Okaloosa County, in the Florida Panhandle. His most notable victims were his 34-year-old wife Sylvia and their two children, seven-year-old Edward and five-year-old Anna. Unsurprisingly, the tragic incident sent shockwaves through the community. It triggered a decade-long legal nightmare, as Zakrzewski’s attorneys appealed his death sentence several times, only to have each appeal tossed out.
In 1976, the Supreme Court allowed Florida to begin using the death penalty again. Since then, Florida has executed a greater percentage of its capital population than any other state in the nation. Zakrzewski’s execution will take Florida above its own record for executions in a given year. That record of eight was a low mark, set all the way back in 2014. The state has already scheduled a tenth execution for August 19 and an eleventh for August 28, indicating a significant increase in capital punishment activity.
Florida’s three-drug cocktail for lethal injections is problematic. This cocktail consists of a sedative, a paralytic agent, and a drug that causes cardiac arrest. On July 15, the state carried out its last death sentence. At 10 a.m. that day, Michael Bernard Bell was still preparing to die by lethal injection.
The choice to carry out Zakrzewski’s execution has touched off renewed discussion about the effectiveness and ethics of the death penalty. Critics insist that executions do not improve public safety and can even continue a cycle of violence.
“Florida does not need the death penalty to be safe. This execution will not make us safer, it will simply add another act of violence to an already tragic story. Justice does not require death.” – “the script”
As the execution date approaches, the discussion surrounding capital punishment in Florida is quickly escalating. This powerful and intimate conversation illuminates some of the hardest ethical questions involved in the use of the death penalty.