Florida has carried out the execution of William Reaves, a 77-year-old Army veteran convicted of killing an Indian River County deputy in 1986. Reaves was pronounced dead at 6.12pm on Tuesday following a three-drug lethal injection at Florida State Prison near Starke.
He was sentenced to death for the first-degree murder of Deputy Richard Raczkowski, who was shot during a confrontation outside a convenience store in Vero Beach.
Florida’s Department of Corrections uses a combination of a sedative, a paralytic and a drug intended to stop the heart in its lethal injection protocol. Reaves’s lawyers had challenged the method, but the courts had previously upheld it in similar cases.
The execution was Florida’s 18th this year, continuing the state’s record use of capital punishment under Republican governor Ron DeSantis. It was also the eighth time Florida has put a prisoner aged over 70 to death in 2026.
Deputy shot after struggle over gun
Court records say Raczkowski responded to a 911 call made from a payphone outside the Vero Beach shop in September 1986. Reaves acknowledged making the call.
While the two men were speaking, a gun fell from Reaves’s shorts, officials said. The pair struggled over the weapon before Reaves regained control of it.
Investigators said Raczkowski tried to run away, but Reaves shot him four times. The deputy later died from his injuries.
Reaves was first convicted and sentenced to death in 1987. The Florida Supreme Court overturned that conviction because of a conflict of interest involving the prosecutor and ordered a new trial.
He was convicted and sentenced to death again in 1992. The state Supreme Court rejected his final appeals last week, while further appeals remained pending before the US Supreme Court.
Veterans urged governor to halt execution
Reaves’s defence team argued that jurors who recommended the death penalty had not been told that the Department of Veterans Affairs had rated him as 100 per cent disabled with post-traumatic stress disorder linked to his service in the Vietnam War.
More than 100 veterans wrote to Mr DeSantis on Monday asking him to stop the execution. The governor, who leaves office in January, has previously said his aim was to deliver justice to victims’ families who had waited decades for death sentences to be carried out.
Florida executed 19 prisoners last year, a state record. With another execution scheduled for November, the state could match that total if both planned executions take place.
Jesse Guardado, 64, is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection on November 5. He was convicted of robbing and killing a woman in 2004 to obtain money for drugs.
Florida has carried out more than half of the 31 executions conducted in the United States so far this year. The state also executed two prisoners on the same day in July, the first such occurrence in almost a decade.
