A Florida man, James Dennis Ford, aged 64, was executed on Thursday in Florida State Prison for the 1997 murders of Gregory Malnory and his wife Kimberly. Their 22-month-old daughter witnessed the horrific attack, which occurred during a fishing trip at a sod farm in Charlotte County.
Ford was pronounced dead at 6:19 PM following a lethal injection involving three drugs. He had no verbal statements, but wrote a note expressing love and blessings before his execution. The couple was brutally killed; Gregory was shot, beaten, and had his throat slit, while Kimberly was raped and shot with the same rifle used on her husband. Investigators later found the rifle near Ford’s disabled truck.
Despite having a low IQ of 65, Ford’s appeals against his death sentence were unsuccessful, with the Florida Supreme Court ruling that his age at the time of the crime disqualified him from claims of intellectual disability. The couple’s daughter, Maranda, did not attend the execution but shared her enduring pain of losing her parents and expressed a sense of peace from Ford’s execution.
As the first execution of 2025 in Florida, Ford’s case follows a significant decline in executions, with only one carried out in 2024 and no executions drugged from 2020 to certain periods under Governor Ron DeSantis.