STARKE, Fla. — Dusty Ray Spencer, 74, is scheduled Thursday to become the ninth person executed this year inside Florida State Prison’s death chamber in Starke.
He’ll be the oldest person put to death in the state since Florida’s reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976.
Spencer stabbed his wife Kathy to death in Orange County in 1992. He was sentenced to death later that year.
Jeff Hood, Spencer’s spiritual advisor, held a news conference last week calling Spencer’s scheduled death a “nursing home execution,” according to CBS News.
“The fact that Dusty Ray Spencer is being executed at his age, in his health, says everything we need to know about how haywire this entire system has gone,” Hood said in the conference call.
Florida executed a state record 19 people in 2025.
Attorney General James Uthmeier at a recent news conference defended Florida’s increasing use of the death penalty.
“We all take an oath to enforce the law,” he said. “The people that are being executed have committed some of the most heinous crimes, unspeakable things, many things to women and children.”
Nineteen days after Spencer’s scheduled execution, Florida is set to put Dennis Sochor to death. The 74-year-old man is 12 days younger than Spencer. He killed an 18-year-old woman he met at a bar 44 years ago during a New Year’s celebration in Broward County.
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