(Adnkronos) – The death sentence issued against Michael Bell, 54, was carried out in Florida in the past few hours. This is the 26th inmate executed this year, marking a record number of capital executions in the United States since 2015, when there were 28. Nine more executions are scheduled for this year. More than half of the executions this year in the United States have taken place in Florida, Texas, and South Carolina. Bell’s death sentence was carried out by lethal injection at the Raiford State Penitentiary, the Florida Department of Corrections announced.
Bell was sentenced to death for the 1993 murders of Jimmy West, 23, and Tamecka Smith, 18, in Jacksonville. The murder was motivated by his desire for revenge against his brother’s killer, Theodore Wright, but he mistakenly killed the latter’s brother and a girl who was with him.
Bell is one of about 30 death row inmates who spent their youth at the infamous Florida School for Boys, nicknamed Dozier. The facility, where numerous acts of cruelty were reported, closed in 2011 after more than a century of operation and inspired the novel “The Nickel Boys” by African-American writer Colson Whitehead, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 2020. In 2016, anthropologists discovered the remains of 55 unmarked graves there.
The death penalty has been abolished in 23 of the 50 US states. Three others, California, Oregon, and Pennsylvania, observe a moratorium on executions decreed by the governor. Of the 26 executions this year, 21 were carried out by lethal injection. Three were executed by nitrogen inhalation, a method used for the first time in the world in Alabama in 2024 and compared by United Nations experts to a form of “torture,” and two by firing squad in South Carolina, for the first time in the United States since 2010.
