DeSantis withdraws a death warrant for the first time, calling off William Lee Thompson's execution.

A withdrawn warrant is not clemency, and it is not a commutation. DeSantis has signed death warrants at a record pace, and this is the first one he has pulled. He did it hours after the Florida Supreme Court refused a stay, two weeks after ordering a three-psychiatrist panel under Florida's insanity-at-execution law, and without saying what that panel found. Thompson is still sentenced to death. The public still does not know whether the state now agrees he cannot understand why it wants to execute him.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has withdrawn a death warrant for the first time since taking office, the Associated Press reported. DeSantis signed a letter Thursday, Oct. 8, 2026, calling off the execution of William Lee Thompson, 74, who had been scheduled to die by lethal injection Tuesday, Oct. 13, at Florida State Prison. CBS Miami, citing the News Service of Florida, reported that the letter, addressed to Warden Randall Polk, did not state a reason. Hours before DeSantis acted, the Florida Supreme Court denied Thompson's motion for a stay.

DeSantis signed Thompson's warrant on Sept. 11. Less than a week later, in Executive Order 26-192 dated Sept. 17, he commissioned a three-member panel of psychiatrists to examine Thompson, noting that his lawyers alleged "Thompson may be insane." According to that order, Thompson's counsel said a neuropsychologist who met with him on Sept. 15 "opined that Mr. Thompson meets the criteria for insanity due to his dementia and significant cognitive decline as Mr. Thompson lacks the mental capacity to understand the fact of his impending execution and the reason for it." The panel was to examine him Oct. 1 and report the next day. Its findings have not been released.

"Mr. Thompson suffers from dementia and his health is failing — both of which were gravely concerning with an impending execution," his attorney, Bri Lacy, said in an email quoted by the Associated Press. "Now that Mr. Thompson is no longer under a death warrant, we hope FDOC (Florida Department of Corrections) will relocate him to an adequate medical facility and provide the care he needs." Grace Hanna, executive director of Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, wrote that Thompson "did not know where he was, stated that 'Bush' was the president, and, at times, did not even recognize that he had been sentenced to death," CBS Miami reported. Hanna said his lawyers have also filed a federal lawsuit seeking care for his medical conditions, which CBS Miami reported include heart failure, and she pointed to Tennessee's failed Sept. 30 execution attempt on Christa Pike.

The case dates to March 1976. According to court records summarized by CBS Miami, a 23-year-old woman was beaten and tortured over hours in a Dade County motel room after she could get only $25 from her family, and she died of internal bleeding and multiple injuries. Thompson pleaded guilty to first-degree murder, kidnapping and sexual battery and was sentenced to death in June 1976. The Florida Supreme Court let him withdraw that plea in 1977. He pleaded guilty again in 1978 and was again sentenced to death. That sentence was vacated in 1987, and at a 1989 resentencing a jury voted 7-5 for death, which the trial court imposed and the state Supreme Court upheld. His co-defendant, Rocco Surace, was convicted of second-degree murder on retrial, sentenced to life and died in prison in 1993.

Florida's other execution set for Tuesday is still on, the Associated Press reported. James Robertson, 63, pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and waived his appeals in the 2008 strangling of his cellmate, Frank Hart, at Charlotte Correctional Institution. Florida carried out 19 executions last year, a state record since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976. Every defendant is presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law, and Thompson's guilt was settled by his own pleas decades ago. What remains open is whether Florida can lawfully execute him at all, and the state has not said what its psychiatrists concluded.