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Starke, Fla. — Thomas Lee Gudinas, 51, is set to be executed by lethal injection at Florida State Prison on Tuesday. Gudinas was convicted of the 1994 rape and murder of Michelle McGrath.
Unless a last-minute reprieve is granted, this will be Florida’s seventh execution this year, with another scheduled for next month. This follows six executions in 2023 and one in 2022.
Nationwide, Gudinas’s execution would be the 23rd of 2025, putting the country on track to exceed the number of executions carried out since 2015. Florida leads the nation in executions this year, followed by Texas and South Carolina with four each.
Alabama has conducted three executions, Oklahoma two, and Arizona, Indiana, Louisiana, and Tennessee one each. Mississippi is scheduled to carry out its first execution since 2022 on Wednesday.
McGrath was last seen alive at Barbarella’s bar around 3 a.m. on May 24, 1994. Her body was discovered hours later in a nearby alley, showing signs of severe trauma and sexual assault.
Gudinas had been at the same bar that night. While his friends testified to leaving without him, a school employee who found McGrath’s body identified Gudinas as a man seen fleeing the area.
Another woman identified him as the man who chased her and threatened to assault her the previous night.
Gudinas was convicted and sentenced to death in 1995. His attorneys have filed appeals with both the Florida Supreme Court and the U.S.
Supreme Court. The state appeal argues that Gudinas’s “lifelong mental illnesses” should exempt him from the death penalty.
This appeal was denied last week, with the court ruling that legal precedents protecting intellectually disabled individuals from execution do not extend to other mental illnesses or brain damage. The federal appeal contends that the Florida governor’s unchecked power to sign death warrants violates inmates’ constitutional rights, creating an arbitrary system for deciding who is executed.
The U.S. Supreme Court has yet to rule on this appeal.