After spending nearly three decades on Death Row, Jacksonville killer Mark James Asay was executed Thursday evening, the state's first inmate to be put to death in more than 19 months and the first execution under a lethal injection procedure never used before in Florida or any other state.
Asay's execution at Florida State Prison was the first since a January 2016 U.S. Supreme Court decision, in a case known as Hurst v. Florida, that effectively put the state's death penalty in limbo. He also was the first white man executed for killing a black victim in Florida.
Asay, 53, was asked whether he wanted to make a final statement. "No sir, I do not. Thank you," he replied. See his last interview Here
He was pronounced dead at 6:22 p.m., 11 minutes after corrections officials announced that the execution phase had begun.
Asay, strapped to a gurney by leather cuffs at his wrists, twitched his legs briefly during the first few minutes of the execution procedure and appeared to breathe rapidly before turning ashen prior to the announcement that “the sentence of the state of Florida” was carried out.
Asay was convicted in the 1987 shooting deaths of Robert Booker and Robert McDowell in downtown Jacksonville. Asay allegedly shot Booker, who was black, after calling him a racial epithet. He then killed McDowell, who was dressed as a woman, after agreeing to pay him for oral sex.
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