Gov. Ron DeSantis has signed Florida’s 14th death warrant of 2026, putting a 74-year-old man convicted in a 1976 Bonita Springs shooting on a path toward execution. Harold Gene Lucas is scheduled to die by lethal injection in September, unless the courts or clemency process intervene.
Lucas is scheduled to be executed Sept. 1 at Florida State Prison in Starke, with the warrant’s execution window running from noon that day through noon Sept. 8, according to the Orlando Sentinel. DeSantis’s latest warrant comes as Florida continues to move condemned prisoners through an unusually crowded execution calendar.
Lucas was convicted in 1977 of first-degree murder and two counts of attempted first-degree murder. His death sentence has been revisited four times during decades of appeals, according to Florida Supreme Court records.
The underlying case dates to a 1976 shooting in Bonita Springs that killed 16-year-old Jill Piper and wounded two of her friends. An archived report by the Naples Daily News described Lucas as Piper’s former boyfriend and noted that he had spent decades on Florida’s death row.
Florida Has Executed 12 People This Year
The new warrant extends a pace that has made Florida the nation’s busiest execution state. The Associated Press reported that Florida had carried out 12 executions in 2026 by Tuesday, more than every other state combined, after conducting a record 19 executions in 2025.
Hoodline has previously tracked the state’s fast-moving death calendar, including another DeSantis warrant that set an August execution date. The state also carried out two executions on the same day in July, a first in Florida in more than six decades.
DeSantis has defended capital punishment as necessary to “bring justice,” the Orlando Sentinel reported. The governor previously said he did not take joy in presiding over executions, while arguing that victims’ families should not have to wait indefinitely.
What The Warrant Means For Lucas
Florida law requires a death sentence to be carried out only after the governor issues a warrant and transmits it to the prison warden. Under Florida’s execution statute, the warrant remains in force if the sentence is not carried out during the designated week.
Lucas’s defense attorneys can still seek court intervention before the execution window opens, and a stay or other legal action could change the schedule. For now, the state has placed Sept. 1 on its calendar as the next major date in a case that has remained active for nearly 50 years.
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