• The horror of the execution: “Seven days before Christmas, he sat beside Walls in the execution chamber, his hand resting on the man’s leg. Walls, with whom he shared communion just hours before, lay strapped to the gurney, his head freshly shaved, intravenous lines running into his right arm. His chest began to heave as he gasped for air for several minutes. Feddon watched as the man’s eyes rolled back and his body went slack and then fell still.” Oddly, the article doesn’t describe in similar detail the death of even one of Walls’ victims. Ooh, seven days before Christmas! This is a shameless irrelevancy, using the holiday to appeal to emotion.
• Numbers without context: “He was the 19th man put to death that year, shattering the state’s annual record of 11, first set in 1936.” If all the condemned were like Walls, so what?
• Again: ProPublica presumes the conclusion without making the case: “The Sunshine State accounted for 40% of all executions in the United States in 2025.” My reaction: why aren’t the other states doing their jobs and ridding the world of their monsters like Frank Walls?
• Everybody [else] doesn’t do it! The article resorts to the Golden Rationalization as if that alone is a persuasive argument that capital punishment isn’t justified: “Florida’s renewed embrace of the death penalty has unfolded against the backdrop of a decades-long national retreat from capital punishment. Thirty-three states have either abolished the death penalty or not carried out an execution in at least a decade. New death sentences have dropped even more precipitously, with prosecutors in capital cases seeking them less often and jurors more likely to choose life in prison. Just 23 people were sentenced to death in the United States last year, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, compared with 307 in 1995.” This is the same invalid argument America’s socialists use to claim that the United States should be more like the rest of the world.
• “The mounting number of death row exonerations — more than 200 since the early 1970s — has made the risk of executing an innocent person impossible to ignore.” I am thoroughly sick of the “if it can’t be flawless, then it shouldn’t be done.” This is an obvious slippery slope, and why we are electing people to Congress who want to eliminate prison and law enforcement generally. My position has always been that we should save the death penalty for the worst of the worst when the evidence is irrefutable. You know…like with Frank Walls.
• The unnecessarily inflated cost :“The steep cost of capital prosecutions has forced many prosecutors to think twice before seeking death; the years of litigation required to obtain and defend a death sentence can add millions of dollars to a case.” That’s an excellent argument for making executions after guilty verdicts much quicker, limiting appeals unless a valid justification for an appeal exists, and shortening the current interminable process to months instead of decades.
• Polls: “Support for the death penalty now stands at its lowest since 1972; a Gallup poll last year found that a majority of Americans under 55 opposed it.” How fortunate we don’t have government by polls!
• Misplaced sympathy: Poor lawyers! “Now, with the added strain of one death warrant following another in rapid succession, the burden on the lawyers who are responsible for these cases has grown even heavier. “You have an execution, and then within a week or two, you’re working on a warrant again,” says Linda McDermott, chief of the Capital Habeas Unit at the Office of the Federal Defender in Tallahassee, which represents Florida death row prisoners in federal court. Last year, eight prisoners represented by her office were executed.” Yes, and public defenders are over-burdened too, having large numbers of case files regarding clients who are almost always guilty. I was one for a while: I never had an innocent client. If the lawyers don’t want their jobs, then they can do something else. Nobody’s forcing them to defend murderers and rapists.
• Executions are icky:

“Last December, with Florida on the verge of carrying out its 19th execution of the year, a retired warden named Ron McAndrew sat down to write an opinion piece for the Tampa Bay Times. A two-time DeSantis voter and self-described “law-and-order guy,” McAndrew was troubled by the rapid increase in executions. “That pace matters,” he wrote, “because executions depend on human beings performing complex, high-risk tasks under extreme pressure.” He warned of the potential for a serious error and the toll on those responsible for carrying out death sentences. “When something goes wrong in an execution chamber, it is not elected officials who absorb the consequences,” he wrote. It is prison staff members “who carry the memories long after the chamber is cleaned and the state moves on.”

This is nonsense. The fact that legal maneuvering has trapped the justice system into absurdly complicated execution methods doesn’t make the executions less necessary. Put a hood over the guy’s head and have a warden walk up and shoot three bullets into that head in rapid succession. What could go wrong with that?

And, of course, because this is ProPublica, the essay engages in Trump-bashing, at least from ProPublica’s perspective:

“President Donald Trump, by contrast, has long been one of the death penalty’s most outspoken champions, making it a cornerstone of his law-and-order agenda. He resumed federal executions in 2020, ending a 17-year hiatus and reviving a punishment that had become an increasingly rare exercise of federal power. Before Trump took office, the federal government had executed just three people since 1963; in the final six months of his first term, it executed 13. He returned to the issue repeatedly on the 2024 campaign trail, calling for broadening the categories of crimes eligible for execution by proposing death sentences for drug dealers, human traffickers and migrants who kill American citizens. Hours after taking office in January 2025, he signed a sweeping executive order titled “Restoring the Death Penalty and Protecting Public Safety” — signaling that the White House intended to put the full weight of the federal government behind the revival of capital punishment. He instructed the attorney general to pursue death sentences more aggressively, called on the Justice Department to challenge Supreme Court decisions limiting the death penalty, directed federal officials to help states obtain the increasingly scarce lethal injection drugs needed to carry out executions and encouraged state prosecutors to seek capital punishment more often.”

My reaction to that: Good! If the public were effectively informed that the result of this has been to rid the nation of the likes of Frank Walls, I am confident that those anti-execution polls numbers would drop, and Trump’s approval ratings would rise.