Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s office announced that Jennings, 66, died at 6:30 p.m. local time, after being injected with three types of drugs at the state prison near the city of Starke. He had been sentenced to death for the murder of Rebecca Kunash nearly half a century ago.
When asked if he wished to make a final statement, he simply replied loudly, “No.” After receiving the lethal injection, his chest rose and his arms twitched for a few minutes before his body settled motionless with his mouth open.
This execution comes as the governor of Oklahoma halted the execution of a prisoner just minutes before the scheduled time, while three executions were scheduled this week in the United States. Steven Bryant, a South Carolina prisoner who committed a horrific five-day murder decades ago, is scheduled to be executed by firing squad today, Friday.
Court records indicate that Jennings was twenty years old and on leave from the Marine Corps on May 11, 1979, when he removed the screen from the girl’s bedroom window while her parents were in another room. According to trial testimony, Jennings kidnapped the girl, took her in his car to a waterway, and assaulted her. He then “swung her by her legs into the ground with such force that it fractured her skull,” according to the records, before drowning her in the canal where her body was found later that day.
Florida relies on lethal injections for executions, which involve the use of a sedative, an anesthetic, and a drug to stop the heart, according to the state’s Department of Corrections.
Florida is preparing to carry out two more executions this year, the first on November 20 for Richard Barry Randolph, and the second on December 9 for Mark Allen Gerads, which could bring the total number of executions in the state to 18 this year.
