Florida has executed the oldest prisoner in its history, the latest in a spate of capital punishments against elderly death-row inmates.
Dennis Sochor was 74 when he was pronounced dead on Tuesday. He was convicted of killing Patricia Gifford in 1982, hours after meeting the 18-year-old at a party. The US Supreme Court rejected his final appeal without comment, said The Guardian.
Sochor is one of three inmates aged over 70 executed over the last month in Florida. The executions have drawn attention to the ageing death-row population in the US, as well as Florida’s status as the foremost death penalty state.
A spate of executions
Florida, known as the Sunshine State, is considered “a mecca for senior citizens”, said The Hill. But it has shown “no compunction about carrying out executions of elderly death-row inmates”.
In October last year, Florida executed 72-year-old Samuel Lee Smithers for the 1996 killings of two women. He was the oldest person to be executed in the state since the US reinstated the death penalty in 1976. Last month, Dusty Ray Spencer, just a week younger than Sochor, died by lethal injection. The 74-year-old had been convicted of stabbing his wife to death in 1992.
Florida is also preparing to execute its first octogenarian later this month. Dominick Anthony Occhicone, who killed his ex-girlfriend’s parents in 1986, turns 81 next month. If his execution goes ahead, he’ll be the second-oldest known inmate put to death in modern US history, after 83-year-old Walter Leroy Moody Jr. in 2018.
Florida has carried out 10 executions this year, more than all other US states combined. Unlike many states, in Florida the state governor has “practically sole discretion” when it comes to deciding whether, and when, the death penalty is applied, said The Associated Press. About half of its 242 death-row inmates have “exhausted their appeals” and could see their death warrant issued at any time. Three of them, not including Occhione, are over 80.
A rapid acceleration
Donald Trump is one of the death penalty’s “most outspoken champions, making it a cornerstone” of his agenda, said The New York Times. And “nowhere has the president’s vision been pursued more relentlessly than in Florida”, thanks to the “unusual concentration of power” in the office of Republican governor Ron DeSantis. In 2025, a record 19 of the 47 executions that took place in the US were in Florida: more than under any other Florida governor since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976 after a four-year nationwide moratorium.
DeSantis has “offered little public explanation” for this acceleration, after “years of relative inactivity”. The governor “makes execution decisions behind closed doors”, so there is “no way to know what criteria” he uses. “He could be deciding who is next to die by throwing darts at a list of names,” said Maria DeLiberato, attorney with the ACLU’s Capital Punishment Project, “or spinning a roulette wheel.”
But Florida isn’t the only state “killing the old and infirm”, said The Hill. Death rows across the US are “filled with old people”. And more are being executed than in the past. The average age of inmates executed in the US has increased from 36 in 1977 to 52.3 in 2024, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
The ageing population also creates new challenges for the penal system, with inmates who have spent decades on death row “sometimes developing medical conditions that can complicate efforts to execute them”, said the AP. Occhicone, the 80-year-old facing execution later this month, has multiple health problems and “needs help getting in and out of the shower”.
Some question “the humanity of administering capital punishment” to prisoners who might soon die naturally. For others, it shows how “lengthy appeals” and reviews designed to prevent an innocent person being executed “can also delay justice”.