Three decades after brutally murdering his wife and kids and escaping to Hawaii, Edward Zakrzewski will be executed today after the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday rejected an eleventh-hour attempt to halt the execution.
It was more than 30 years ago, June 9, 1994, that Zakrzewski, a 29-year-old tech sergeant stationed at Eglin Air Force Base who was unhappy that his wife, Sylvia, was considering divorce, killed her and the couple's two children, 7-year-old Edward and 5-year-old Anna, inside the family's Mary Esther home.
Attorneys for Zakrzewski, 60, urged the court to block the Death Row inmate’s execution, arguing that Florida “is an extreme outlier when it comes to capital punishment.”
The attorneys filed a petition and a motion for a stay of execution July 24, two days after the Florida Supreme Court ruled against Zakrzewski.
Zakrzewski’s execution would make him the ninth inmate put to death by lethal injection this year, setting a modern-era record.
The arguments at the U.S. Supreme Court centered on jury recommendations in 1996 before Circuit Judge G. Robert Barron issued three death sentences for Zakrzewski.
Florida execution: Decades after airman butchered family, Edward Zakrzewski will be put to death in next Florida execution
The jury voted 7-5 to recommend death sentences in the murders of Zakrzewski’s wife, Sylvia, and 7-year-old son, Edward. The jury deadlocked 6-6 in its recommendation in the murder of Zakrzewski’s 5-year-old daughter, Anna.
In a rare move at a sentencing hearing held April 19, 1996, Barron overruled the jury and sentenced Zakrzewski to death for all three of the murders.
An Appeals Court affirmed the judge's decision.
Current Florida law requires that at least eight jurors recommend death for such a sentence to be imposed, while almost all other states that have the death penalty require unanimous jury recommendations.
Zakrzewski’s attorneys contend that executing him after the 7-5 recommendations and the override would be unconstitutional.
Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier’s office on Monday asked the court to reject Zakrzewski’s request, saying the convicted killer is seeking “to “once again turn back the clock to undo his three death sentences,”
Zakrzewski was sentenced to death for using a crowbar, a rope and a machete to murder his wife and two children in 1994 in their Okaloosa County home.
This article originally appeared on Pensacola News Journal: florida-execution-today-live-updates-edward-zakrzewski
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