Governor DeSantis has signed a death warrant in a Bonita Springs case from 1976, setting an execution window that opens on September 1

Governor Ron DeSantis signed a death warrant on Thursday for Harold Gene Lucas, 74, in the killing of 16-year-old Jill Piper at her home in Bonita Springs in August 1976.

The warrant calls for Lucas to be put to death by lethal injection at Florida State Prison in Starke. The window to carry out the sentence runs from noon on September 1 through noon on September 8.

The account here follows a report by Jim Turner of the News Service of Florida, published by Gulf Coast News on July 30.

According to court records as described in that report, Lucas went to Piper's home on August 13, 1976, a week after being arrested for criminal trespassing at the residence. He was 24 at the time. Armed with a rifle, he fired at Piper and two friends who were in the yard. Piper was hit and the two friends ran inside. Both were later shot and survived. Piper was shot several more times and died. Lucas was arrested the following day.

The report states that Lucas testified he remembered getting high on the night of the killing, lost consciousness and woke up in the woods. A jury found him guilty of first-degree murder and two counts of attempted first-degree murder in 1977 and unanimously recommended a sentence of death. The sentence has been revisited four times since, including an 11 to 1 jury recommendation for death in 1987, and was never altered.

This publication has not read the verdict, the sentencing order or the appellate record first hand, and the description above is as the News Service of Florida attributes it to court records.

The warrant itself was not available to read. Florida death warrants are issued as executive orders, and the Executive Office of the Governor publishes those in a dated index at flgov.com. That index was checked directly on the evening of July 30 and listed nothing later than executive order #2026-153, dated July 21. The Lucas warrant had not been posted there at the time of publication.

The News Service of Florida reported the warrant as the fourteenth the Governor has signed this year. This publication could not confirm that count against the Governor's index for the reason above, and notes that at least one other account published on Thursday gave a different figure. The number is reported here as that outlet's, not as our own.

The report also records remarks the Governor made on Tuesday evening at the Florida Sheriffs Association Summer Conference, after a rare single-day double execution earlier that day. He said he did not take joy in presiding over it or pride in signing the warrants, that capital punishment is needed to "bring justice", and that "some of the victims' families have been waiting a long time." He also questioned the length of the appeals process.

A separate execution, in a Central Florida case unrelated to this one, is scheduled for August 18.