Desantis signed death command for people who was convicted in 1994

TALLAHASSE – On Friday, governor Ron Desantis continued to sign the pace of executions in Florida and signed a death sentence on Friday for a man who was convicted of rape from 1994 and murder of a woman in the city center of Orlando.

The arrest warrant was signed for Thomas Gudinas (51), which is to be executed on June 24 and the seventh inmate, which was killed by fatal injection this year. Five men were executed and the inmate Anthony Wainwright is scheduled to die on June 10th.

Gudinas was sentenced to Michelle McGrath in May 1994, who was traveling in the city center of Orlando for a night of entertainment. McGrath was recently seen alive in the courtyard of a night club at around 2:45 a.m. and was probably attacked when she drove to her car in a parking lot, as can be seen from a 1995 judgment order.

McGrath's body was found in an alley at around 7:30 a.m. and “raped wildly with a blunt instrument”, wrote the then judge Belvin Perry Jr. in the conviction that was published on Friday on the website of the Supreme Court of Florida with the death sentence and another material about the case.

“The evidence clearly stipulates that (the victim) does not encounter a quick, merciful and painless death,” says the conviction. “The defendant that night showed that a disposition without scruple or restraint was violent. (The victim) was struck and taken into a alley in which she spent her last minutes on earth. It was not only beaten in this alley, but the accused raped it barbarically.”

Gudinas was sentenced to death in June 1995 after the process was moved to Collier County.

The Gudinas death command and other documents were published on Friday on the website of the Supreme Court without comment from Desantis – as was the case with other deaths that he signed this year.

But the state clearly increases the pace of executions after killing an inmate in 2024 and six in 2023. Since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976 after a decision by the US Colonel Court stopped, most of the executions that were in Florida in one year were most of the executions that took place in 1984 and 2014, which was carried out on the website of the corrections of the corrections of the corrections of the corrections.

This year the state executed Glen Rogers on May 15; Jeffrey Hutchinson on May 1st; Michael Tanzi on April 8; Edward James on March 20; and James Ford on February 13th.

Desantis also signed a death command against Wainwright, who was condemned in 1994 for a woman from a parking lot of the Winn-Dixie supermarket in Lake City and raped and murdered in rural Hamilton County. The Wainwright lawyers went to the Supreme Court of Florida to try to stop the planned execution on June 10th.

By Jim Saunders, news service from Florida