A Florida man scheduled for execution Tuesday night will be the 26th person to be executed nationwide this year, marking the most death penalty sentences carried out in a single year since 2015.
Michael Bernard Bell, 54, was sentenced to death for the 1993 murders of a 23-year-old man and an 18-year-old woman outside a bar in Jacksonville.
Bell and his attorneys have made numerous legal appeals in the case, but the courts have rejected all of them. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed his death warrant in June, and the U.S. Supreme Court had not ruled on Bell’s appeal as of Tuesday afternoon.
Bell’s execution by lethal injection at a state prison in Starke will surpass 2024’s total of 25 executions nationwide. In 2015, there were 28 executions across the country, a number that is likely to be surpassed later this year.
On Dec. 9, 1993, Bell spotted a vehicle that was connected to the killing of his brother outside a bar in Jacksonville, according to authorities. He waited outside the building armed with an AK-47.
When the vehicle’s owner, Jimmy West, walked out of the club, he was with two women, one of whom was Tamecka Smith. Bell unloaded a hail of bullets, killing West and Smith while sending the second woman to the hospital.
West was not the person who killed his brother. West’s half-brother, Theodore Wright, killed Bell’s brother in what investigators determined was a case of self-defense, then gave West his car.
Bell was convicted and sentenced to death in 1995. He was later convicted of three additional murders, including the killings of a mother and her toddler son in 1989.
With News Wire Services
