Florida to execute Harold Lucas in 14th lethal injection this year as death chamber remains busiest in U.S.
MIAMI (AP) — A Florida man convicted of fatally shooting a 16-year-old girl who rejected his romantic advances is set to be executed Tuesday evening in what remains the nation’s busiest death chamber.
Harold Gene Lucas, 74, is scheduled to receive a three-drug lethal injection at Florida State Prison near Starke beginning at 6 p.m. The execution is Florida’s 14th this year and the first of three death warrants signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis for this month.
Lucas chose not to pursue appeals with the Florida Supreme Court or the U.S. Supreme Court. After his death warrant was issued, he told a circuit judge he wanted to waive all post-conviction proceedings, and the judge granted that request days later.
“I’ve been on death row for 50 years, and I have no desire to carry this any further,” Lucas said, according to court transcripts. “The sooner it’s over, the better I’ll enjoy it. I am tired.”
His conviction stems from the August 1976 killing of Jill Piper, 16, and the shooting of her friends Richard Byrd Jr. and Terri Rice at a home in Bonita Springs. Lucas was 24 at the time, had known Piper for four years, worked for her family and had dated her. He also told a friend he planned to marry her, investigators said. But Piper had rejected his advances, and after Lucas was arrested for trespassing at her home, he and Piper had two confrontations on the same day about a week later. Witnesses said Lucas threatened to kill her.
Piper asked Byrd and Rice to stay overnight for protection. Lucas arrived with a rifle and shot Piper multiple times while she begged for her life, then shot and wounded her friends, officials said. He was arrested the next day.
Lucas was convicted of first-degree murder and two counts of attempted first-degree murder. The original 1977 death sentence came with a 12-0 jury recommendation, but the Florida Supreme Court found that the trial judge wrongly considered the heinousness of the attempted murders when deciding punishment. The same judge resentenced him to death in 1980. After the original judge died, a successor imposed another death sentence in 1985, but the state Supreme Court ordered a new jury. That jury recommended death 11-1, resulting in a fourth death sentence in 1987. The Supreme Court again found a problem with the sentencing order, and Lucas received his fifth and final death sentence in 1990. No later appeals were successful.
Lucas’s execution is the latest marker of Florida’s aggressive use of capital punishment. In 2025, 47 people were executed nationwide, and Florida carried out 19 — more than any other state and a record since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976. This year, Florida has accounted for more than half of the 23 executions in the U.S. so far. In July, Florida became the first state in nearly a decade to carry out two executions in a single day.
Two more executions are planned later this month. Daniel Owen Conahan Jr., 72, is scheduled to die Sept. 10 for kidnapping and strangling a man he had paid to pose for nude photos, and authorities suspect him in similar killings in southwest Florida in the 1990s. Curtis Wilkie Beasley, 77, is scheduled Sept. 29 for beating a woman to death with a hammer, robbing her and stealing her car in 1995.
All Florida executions use a three-drug lethal injection protocol — a sedative, a paralytic and a drug that stops the heart — according to the Department of Corrections.