Before the case summaries, before the legal arguments, before the wire service reports and the true crime retrospectives that will come, there is this: Danny Conahan joined the Navy and served his country during the Vietnam wind down, hardly a time when people were signing up to wear the uniform. He had a warmth and a humor that the people who knew him describe with the kind of specificity that only comes from real relationship. He made origami birthday hats for the men who lived near him on death row. He had a great laugh. He loved ABBA. In his final days, friends traveled from across Florida, across the country, and from across the world to see him.

He built a life and deep friendships while imprisoned for a crime he maintained he did not commit. That is an extraordinary thing. It is not the thing most of us could do. He did it with warmth and humor for more than three decades, and then Florida executed him.

If you have seen Danny in the news, and more coverage will come, please take it with a grain of salt. The people who knew him and worked alongside him have said it clearly: victims and their families deserve truthful answers supported by evidence, not suspicions and suppositions repeated so often that they are eventually treated as proven facts. That is the standard to hold any coverage to.

Curtis Beasley was sentenced to death for the 1995 murder of Carolyn Monfort. He is now 77 years old. He uses a wheelchair. He is in serious physical and cognitive decline and needs help caring for himself. Florida’s answer to all of that is to proceed with his execution on September 29 at 6 p.m. Mark your calendar for a vigil or protest that evening if a court does not intervene before then.

Carolyn Monfort’s death was real. Her family’s loss is real. Nothing about opposing this execution dismisses what happened to her or to the people who loved her. What is also real is that executing a 77-year-old man in a wheelchair who is in serious cognitive decline is not justice. It is the exercise of state power for its own sake, and it is being carried out by a governor who leaves office in January and appears determined to use every remaining week of his tenure to run up the count.

Governor DeSantis has signed a new death warrant for William “Bill” Thompson, setting his execution for Tuesday, October 13 at 6 p.m. Bill is intellectually disabled and in serious cognitive decline. More details about his case will be shared by the Florida Abolitionists for Death Penalty in the coming days. For now, the most important thing you can do is sign his petition and share it as widely as possible.

Florida executes people at a rate that the rest of the country watches with a combination of disbelief and exhaustion. But Florida is not the only state doing this. Eight executions are scheduled in September 2026 across five states. Each person on this list is a human being with a history, a family somewhere, and a case with its own set of facts. Keep them in your hearts, even when the names go by quickly in the news.

The people fighting executions in Georgia, Texas, Alabama, and Tennessee need the same energy and community support that the Florida campaign generates. Each of these cases deserves attention. Each of these people deserves advocates who will not let them disappear into a calendar entry.

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For the full legal, factual, and case-specific details on every execution, we trust and defer to the organizations doing this work every single day. Follow them, support them, and read their statements.