Florida Executes 72-Year-Old Inmate

A man convicted of killing two women whose bodies were found in a rural pond in 1996 was put to death Tuesday evening in a record 14th execution this year in Florida. Samuel Lee Smithers, 72, was pronounced dead at 6:15pm following a lethal injection at Florida State Prison near Starke, the office of Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis said. Smithers was convicted of two counts of first-degree murder and sentenced to death in 1999, the AP reports. When asked if he had a final statement, Smithers said, "No sir," according to DeSantis spokesman Alex Lanfranconi. He said there were no complications.

Smithers' death extended Florida's record for total executions in a single year, with the state planning to carry out two more executions later this month and next. Since the US Supreme Court restored the death penalty in 1976, the highest previous annual total of Florida executions was eight in 2014.

• Court records indicate Smithers met Christy Cowan and Denise Roach on different dates in May 1996 at a Tampa motel to pay them for sex. At the time, he was doing landscape maintenance on a 27-acre property that included three ponds in rural Plant City, Florida.
• On May 28, 1996, the property owner—who had met Smithers in a church where he was a Baptist deacon—stopped by to find Smithers cleaning an ax in the carport, which he claimed to be using to trim tree limbs. The property owner noticed a pool of blood in the carport, and Smithers told her that someone must have come by and killed a small animal, according to court records.

• The woman contacted law enforcement, and a sheriff's deputy met her later that day at the property. The blood had been cleaned up, but the deputy noticed drag marks leading to one of the ponds, according to court records. That's where authorities found the bodies of Cowan and Roach. Both women had been severely beaten, strangled, and left in the pond to die.
• The Florida Supreme Court denied an appeal from Smithers last week. His attorneys had argued that his age should make him ineligible for execution under the US Constitution's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. Although Smithers would be one of the oldest people ever executed in Florida, the justices ruled that the elderly are not categorically exempt from the death penalty. On Tuesday afternoon, the US Supreme Court rejected a late appeal without comment.