TALLAHASSEE — Continuing a pace of two executions a month, Gov. Ron DeSantis on Friday signed a death warrant for a man convicted in the 1998 sexual assault and murder of a Northwest Florida attorney who was his neighbor.
Norman Grim, 65, is scheduled to be executed Oct. 28 and could be a modern-era record 15th inmate executed this year in Florida. The state has executed 12 inmates, with Victor Tony Jones scheduled to be put to death Tuesday at Florida State Prison and Samuel Smithers slated for execution Oct. 14.
Two executions were carried out in May, two in June, two in July, two in August, and Jones would be the second inmate put to death in September. David Pittman was executed Sept. 17 in the 1990 murders of three members of his estranged wife’s family in Polk County.
Grim was convicted in the July 1998 murder of Cynthia Chapman, an attorney who was his neighbor in Santa Rosa County. Chapman’s body was found by fishermen in Pensacola Bay.
“She had suffered multiple blunt force injuries to her face and head consistent with hammer blows, and she was stabbed 11 times in the chest,” Attorney General James Uthmeier’s office said in a document filed Friday with the death warrant at the Florida Supreme Court. ”Seven of the stab wounds penetrated the victim’s heart. Physical evidence, including DNA, tied Grim to Ms. Campbell’s murder.”
The death warrant is expected to touch off a legal battle about whether the execution should be carried out. It came the same day that Smithers’ attorneys filed a notice of appeal at the Supreme Court after a Hillsborough County circuit judge refused to halt his scheduled execution.
Smithers, 72, was convicted of killing two women in 1996 in Hillsborough County and dumping their bodies in a pond. DeSantis signed his death warrant Sept. 12.
The previous modern-era record for executions in a year was eight in 1984 and 2014. The modern era represents the time since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, after a 1972 U.S. Supreme Court ruling halted it.
Norman Grim, 65, is scheduled to be executed Oct. 28 and could be a modern-era record 15th inmate executed this year in Florida. (Florida Department of Corrections/Courtesy)
DeSantis has said little publicly about the pace of executions this year but has rebuffed requests by death-penalty opponents such as the Florida Conference of Catholic Bishops to commute the death sentences of condemned killers to life in prison.
In addition to Pittman, the state has executed Curtis Windom on Aug. 28; Kayle Bates on Aug. 19; Edward Zakrzewski on July 31; Michael Bell on July 15; Thomas Gudinas on June 24; Anthony Wainwright on June 10; Glen Rogers on May 15; Jeffrey Hutchinson on May 1; Michael Tanzi on April 8; Edward James on March 20; and James Ford on Feb. 13.
