This spring, Father Dustin Feddon began waking up in the middle of the night. Heart racing, he would stand at the bathroom sink in the dark, splashing cold water on his face until the feeling passed.

For about a dozen years, Feddon had visited prisoners on Florida’s death row as their appeals wound their way through the courts. Some had waited for decades, but the priest learned, more or less, how to accompany people through years of confinement and isolation without losing himself in their desolation. Then in January 2025, Gov. Ron DeSantis began signing death warrants at an accelerated rate. What followed was the busiest period of executions in more than eight decades in a state that has long been a stronghold of capital punishment.

In November, DeSantis set the execution date for Frank Walls, one of the men Feddon was counseling. Walls was moved from death row, at Union Correctional Institution, about an hour west of Jacksonville in the northeast part of the state, to nearby Florida State Prison. There he was placed in one of the three cells, known as death watch, that sit 30 feet from the execution chamber. And with that, Feddon was drawn into the strange, intimate work of accompanying a condemned person through the final weeks of his life.

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.

He was the 19th man put to death that year, shattering the state’s annual record of 11, first set in 1936; the Sunshine State accounted for 40% of all executions in the United States in 2025.

Soon there were more prisoners who sought out the priest. One received an execution date in February, another in May. With each new death warrant, Feddon felt the panic rising in his chest. The pace of executions had upended the nature of his work; no longer was he ministering to men living under sentences of death; he was preparing them to die.

Feddon spent years getting ready for this role without quite knowing it. He entered the seminary in his 30s after temporarily taking a break from a doctoral program in religion, and during a year of hands-on ministry before his ordination, he began visiting prisoners. He went on to found Joseph House, a reentry home in Tallahassee, where he lives alongside men newly released from prison and often scarred by years in solitary confinement. There, he helps residents rebuild their lives — driving them to jobs, doctor appointments and therapy sessions; helping them obtain ID cards and open bank accounts; refereeing the inevitable dramas of communal living. There were no off days. He spent one Christmas waiting with a resident in an emergency room.

By the spring, he was ministering to the two men on death watch. As often as allowed, he came to see them, spending four hours on the road, round trip, to talk and pray with the men as they awaited execution. Some mornings he drove to Florida State Prison after only a few hours of sleep; and some days he returned to Joseph House so drained that the demands and small crises awaiting him there seemed strangely distant. At a spiritual retreat one afternoon, he suddenly became preoccupied with the idea that the priest who stood before him speaking was on the verge of collapse. Searching for an explanation, he told me he had become “hypervigilant of mortality — of other people dying, not me dying, but other people dying right in front of me.”

Florida has executed nine men this year, more than all other states combined. The pace has transformed death watch, which had typically been empty or held one man at a time. Now all three cells are often occupied, with the next man scheduled to die housed closest to the chamber. After each execution, the prisoners advance one cell closer; then another condemned man receives an execution date and is moved into the vacant cell. Death watch, once a lonely way station, has begun to resemble an assembly line.

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.

Support for capital punishment has been worn away by an accumulation of forces. 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. 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. Decades of declining violent crime have further blunted the public appetite for executions. 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.

This July marks the 50th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Gregg v. Georgia, which reinstated the death penalty, making it a defining feature of the American criminal justice system. But capital punishment has since lost its hold on the political imagination, with executions persisting in only a small number of states, including Texas, Oklahoma, Alabama and Missouri.

That retreat from capital punishment is apparent in governors’ offices across the country. In 2000, Gov. George Ryan of Illinois, a Republican, declared a moratorium on executions, after the exoneration of 13 men who had been on death row; before leaving office, he commuted nearly all death sentences in the state to life in prison. More recently, Democrats like Gov. Gavin Newsom of California and Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania imposed or maintained moratoriums. In June, Ohio’s governor, Mike DeWine, a Republican and a former prosecutor who helped write his state’s death penalty statute, called for abolishing capital punishment there, concluding that it did not deter murder and abandoning his belief that it was morally justified.

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........

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