Florida executed a man on Dec. 18 who was convicted of killing a man and his girlfriend during a home invasion 38 years ago, after the U.S. Supreme Court denied a reprieve earlier in the day.
The condemned man, Frank Athen Walls, had filed an emergency application with the court days earlier, arguing that he was intellectually disabled and that lower courts failed to properly consider his condition.
Before the injection was administered, Walls apologized, according to a spokesman for DeSantis.
“Good evening, everyone. I appreciate the opportunity to say what’s on my heart. If any of the family members are here, I am sorry for all of the things that I did, the pain I caused, and all of that you have suffered all these years,” Walls said.
Walls was arrested a day after the bodies were discovered. When searching Walls’s home, investigators said they identified items from the crime scene. He later confessed to the killings.
Walls was found guilty on two counts of murder, along with kidnapping and burglary, and in 1988 was sentenced to death. The Florida Supreme Court reversed, ordering a new trial, at which Walls was convicted, and again sentenced to death in 1992.
Following his conviction, DNA evidence tied Walls to the 1987 rape and murder of Audrey Gygi. Walls entered a plea of no contest and was convicted. He also confessed to the killings of Tommie Lou Whiddon in 1985 and Cynthia Sue Condra in 1986 as part of a plea bargain.
“Because of Mr. Walls’ intellectual disability, he is of a class of individuals constitutionally prohibited from execution under the Eighth Amendment,” the petition said, citing the U.S. Supreme Court’s Eighth Amendment decision in Atkins v. Virginia (2002).
That high court ruling held that the Eighth Amendment’s bar on cruel and unusual punishment precluded death sentences for intellectually disabled individuals.
The U.S. Supreme Court issued another ruling in 2014, finding in Hall v. Florida that states may not impose a rigid IQ cutoff because “intellectual disability is a condition, not a number.”
Before Hall, Florida law prescribed an IQ score of 70 as a cutoff, meaning someone with a score below 70 could not be executed.
The petition said Walls has repeatedly argued in lower court proceedings that Atkins makes him ineligible for the death penalty.
“Yet an amalgamation of wrongly decided state court [precedents] and convoluted procedural hurdles have thus far prevented a merits-determination on whether Mr. Walls is [categorically] prohibited from being executed,” the petition said.
“The record is rich with evidence of Mr. Walls’ intellectual disability,” the petition said, adding that he has “qualifying IQ scores,” and that there is evidence of his “subaverage functioning and issues with adaptive functioning.”
“An individual who is categorically ineligible for execution because of his intellectual disability must have his Atkins claim heard before an execution warrant is carried out,” the petition said.
The brief also said that when tested as an adult, Walls was found to have an IQ of 74 at age 24 and 72 at age 39. When 74 and 72 are averaged, the result is 73, which is not “significantly subaverage general intellectual functioning.” Three tests administered when he was a minor arrived at higher scores of 88, 101, and 102, which, when averaged, yield a figure of 97, which “reflects normal intelligence.”
“Walls is not now intellectually disabled and never was,” the brief said.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling denying the emergency application came while the justices are considering Hamm v. Smith, a case about how judges should weigh IQ scores when determining whether a convict was wrongly sentenced to death.
On Dec. 10, the justices questioned how much flexibility states should have in guiding those determinations of intellectual disability in the context of the Eighth Amendment, as well as how courts should consider factors such as the margin of error for IQ tests.
The Supreme Court is expected to issue a ruling in Hamm v. Smith by the end of June 2026.
