Black inmate executed amid rising Florida death penalty record

Florida carried out its seventeenth execution of the year using lethal injection. According to the Associated Press, Richard Bray Randolph, a 63-year-old American inmate, was executed on Friday, November 21, at a Florida state prison.

Last week, the Florida Supreme Court rejected Randolph’s appeal, and the U.S. Supreme Court also denied his final appeal on Thursday morning local time.

Randolph’s execution marks the seventeenth death penalty carried out in Florida in 2025. The high number of executions in this state has earned it the label “the execution capital of the U.S.”

Florida’s previous record for executions in a single year was eight, set in 2014. Across the United States, 44 executions have been carried out so far this year.

After Florida, the states with the next highest number of executions are Alabama, South Carolina, and Texas, each carrying out five death sentences.

Two more executions are scheduled in Florida next month. The state’s eighteenth execution of 2025 will be for Mark Allen Geralds, 58, on December 9, and the nineteenth will be for Frank Aten Walz, 58, on December 18.