Florida executes 72-year-old Smithers for 1996 double murders

Samuel Lee Smithers, 72, was executed Tuesday evening by lethal injection at Florida State Prison near Starke for the 1996 killings of two women, a sentence carried out under a death warrant signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis. Corrections officials said the execution began at 6 p.m. and Smithers was pronounced dead at 6:15 p.m. When asked if he had a final statement, he replied, "No sir."

Smithers was convicted in 1999 of two counts of first degree murder in the deaths of Christy Cowan and Denise Roach. According to court records, he met the women separately at a Tampa motel in May 1996 and paid them for sex. At the time, Smithers was working as a landscape maintenance contractor on a 27 acre property in rural Plant City that included three ponds. On May 28, 1996, the property owner found what she described as a pool of blood in a carport and later alerted police. Investigators discovered the women's bodies in a pond; authorities said both had been severely beaten, strangled and left in the water.

Smithers maintained his innocence through much of his incarceration, but his appeals were rejected at state and federal levels. The Florida Supreme Court denied a recent appeal in which his...