Mother JonesModify

2026-02-28 20:30:00

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

One day, you’ll appreciate drinking recycled toilet water. 

Urban populations are growing as water supplies are dwindling, often due to worsening droughts. In response, some communities are treating wastewater, rendering it perfectly safe for consumption. It is so pure, in fact, that if a treatment facility doesn’t add enough of the minerals the filtering process strips out, it could do serious damage to the human body. And trust me—it tastes great, too.

Cities throughout the American West are already recycling water, easing pressures on dwindling supplies. Now here’s a thought experiment: How much would you pay on your utility bill for the privilege of reused water, if it meant avoiding shortages and rationing in the future?

A recent survey offers one answer. Residents of communities of fewer than 10,000 people said they’d be willing to drop an average of $49 to do so. That money would underwrite water reuse programs, including rain capture systems. “I do think it is a bipartisan issue,” said Todd Guilfoos, an economist at the University of Rhode Island and co-author of the new paper. “It’s often just cheaper than some of the other available solutions.”

Wastewater recycling is not some far-out, prohibitively complicated technology. Western states are already doing a lot of it: A study published last year found that Nevada reuses 85 percent of its water, and Arizona 52 percent. Water agencies do this with reverse osmosis, passing the liquid through fine membranes to filter out solids before blasting it with UV light, which destroys any microbes. On a smaller scale, apartment buildings can house their own treatment infrastructure, cycling water back into units for nonpotable use, like flushing toilets.

On the municipal level, though, it’s expensive to build such facilities and run them continuously—it takes a lot of energy, for instance, to force water through those membranes. For a small community, charging each household $49 per month wouldn’t be quite enough to get a system up and running. “While that might be enough for operating, that doesn’t include what it would cost to actually build whatever water reuse infrastructure that you would need,” Guilfoos said. That’s when a town can turn to federal or state grants, or maybe utilize municipal bonds, to break ground. “I think communities need a little bit of a bump, actually, to get there,” Guilfoos added. “I think usually it’s in the face of some crises that these things end up getting built.”

Those crises are piling up across the US. Droughts are forcing some rural areas to pump more and more H2O from aquifers, depleting them. Tapped unsustainably, these underground supplies can collapse like an empty water bottle, making the land above sink, a phenomenon known as subsidence. This is a particularly pernicious problem in agricultural regions—California’s San Joaquin Valley has sunk up to 28 feet in recent decades, to offer just one example. 

If supplies dwindle, a small community would have no choice but to ration water. Getting more efficient about using what we have can help, like encouraging the adoption of thriftier toilets and spraying less on lawns, as Las Vegas has done. (Those thirsty patches of green are in general an environmental mess, beyond their use of water.) But to truly get more sustainable, a community will have to recycle the H2O it has no choice but to use.

What’s interesting about this study, says Michael Kiparsky, director of the Wheeler Water Institute at the University of California, Berkeley, is the apparent overcoming of the “yuck factor.” “There’s a visceral reaction to drinking reused water, particularly reused wastewater, that’s totally understandable,” said Kiparsky, who wasn’t involved in the research. “But over time, that has faded as the notion of reusing water to augment water supplies, including for drinking water, has become increasingly legitimized.” 

At the same time, simple infrastructural improvements can capture heaps of another supply that’s readily wasted: rain. That $49 a month could fund bioswales, for instance—ditches full of vegetation that not only collect stormwater, but provide habitat for native plants and pollinators. Cities like Los Angeles are making themselves more “spongy” in this way, with roadside plots of land that collect runoff in subterranean tanks. Elsewhere, architects are building “agrihoods” around working farms that store precipitation to hydrate their crops through the summer.

In the American West, farmers are also having to contend with water whiplash, meaning years of plenty followed by years of desiccation. Generally speaking, rain is falling more heavily because a warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture, increasing the bounty. But so too does climate change exacerbate droughts, making wastewater reuse especially welcome on farms. “All of this makes the water supply less certain in any given year, and more volatile from year to year,” said Tom Corringham, a research economist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, who wasn’t involved in the new paper. “So any strategies that we can find that can smooth out the water cycle are beneficial.”

In addition to recycling wastewater, farmers are recharging the aquifers beneath their feet: When rains fall heavily, and there’s a surplus of water, channels divert fluid into “spreading grounds”—basically big dirt bowls built into the landscape. That allows precipitation to percolate back into the ground, reducing loss from evaporation, replacing what’s been drawn out, and helping avoid land subsidence. Then, when needed, a farm can pump the water back out of the ground, in which case it doesn’t need to draw from, say, a dam, leaving more water for others to use.

Together with wastewater reuse, aquifer recharge can help bolster the water system for the climatically perilous years ahead. As metropolises like Mexico City and Cape Town run the risk of running out of water, drinking recycled wastewater will be a whole lot more appealing than losing hydration entirely.

2026-02-28 16:01:00

The schools in Steubenville, Ohio, are doing something unusual—in fact, it’s almost unheard of. In a country where nearly 40 percent of fourth graders struggle to read at even a basic level, Steubenville has succeeded in teaching virtually all of its students to read well. 

According to data from the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University, Steubenville has routinely scored in the top 10 percent or better of schools nationwide for third-grade reading, sometimes scoring as high as the top 1 percent.

In study after study for decades, researchers have found that districts serving low-income families almost always have lower test scores than districts in more affluent places. Yet Steubenville bucks that trend.

“It was astonishing to me how amazing that elementary school was,” said Karin Chenoweth, who wrote about Steubenville in her book How It’s Being Done: Urgent Lessons From Unexpected Schools.

This week on Reveal, reporter Emily Hanford shares the latest from the hit APM Reports podcast Sold a Story. We’ll learn how Steubenville became a model of reading success—and how a new law in Ohio put it all at risk. 

This is an update of an episode that originally aired in April 2025.

2026-02-28 04:51:09

Avery Rowland starts almost all of her days by posting a TikTok video beginning with “good morning” and, often, explaining the latest anti-transgender action from her state’s Republican supermajority. 

“Today is a rough day here in Kansas,” Rowland, who grew up in the state and is now running for a state representative seat, began her TikTok on Thursday. “My license got invalidated.” 

Rowland is one of the hundreds of transgender Kansans now tasked with replacing their driver’s licenses after a new state law went into effect this week that invalidates preexisting IDs with gender markers that do not match someone’s sex assigned at birth. The law applies to new IDs moving forward, too. It also invalidates the birth certificates of people who changed the document’s gender marker. If a driver is caught on the road with an old ID, they’ll be required to surrender it. In Kansas, driving without a license could result in fines and, in specific cases, end in jail time.

The new law, known as SB 244, also mandates people entering government-owned buildings to use the restrooms, showers, and locker rooms that correspond with sex assigned at birth. In an escalation from some other state laws, it deputizes people to accuse others, allowing anyone to claim someone used the restroom not allowed under the law and sue for damages of $1,000. Two transgender Kansans sued to strike down the law and pause the state’s enforcement on Friday.

“The persecution is the point,” Rep. Abi Boatman, a Wichita Democrat and the only transgender member of the legislature, told The Kansas City Star. Boatman, like other Kansans who had changed a gender marker on their identification, received a letter in the mail this week noting that their license would be invalid. The law doesn’t include a grace period for changing IDs and also doesn’t provide funding, forcing individuals to pay the cost of the new driver’s license.

The law was rushed. Republicans used a “gut and go” maneuver. Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly vetoed the bill, but the legislature quickly overrode the decision. 

“They want me to hide or leave or disappear, not to be visible and active in public society,” Rowland told me. She’s running in this year’s midterm for the Kansas House of Representatives to represent District 2 as a Democrat.

I spoke with Rowland about the law and going toe-to-toe with the state’s Republican lawmakers. 

Could you walk me through this morning?

My work is a 25 mile commute, so I didn’t feel comfortable driving without a valid license. I went to the county courthouse because it was only a mile drive, and I felt I could do that safely. 

I went in and I pulled some shenanigans. I looked up yesterday what is needed for a lost driver’s license, which was two proofs of ID and proof of residency. I talked to the clerk, a very kind, nice young lady, and I said, ‘I lost my license. I misplaced it, I need to replace it.’ And she did the whole thing, took a picture, and handed me a brand new paper printout license and it said female. And I thought, ‘hmm interesting.’ Then I pulled out the letter from my purse that says, ‘Avery Rowland, your valid license has been invalidated.’ I played kind of dumb, saying, ‘I don’t quite know what it means. What do I need to do?’

She looked at it, and she had no clue what to do. So she had to go call the state office, and then they changed it on their side in the computer from female to male, and then reprinted it. She was confused when I handed her the letter, because my passport says female, I very much look like a female, because I am a woman. It’s confusing.

Have legislators done a good enough job at informing their constituents that their IDs have been invalidated?

We are a Republican supermajority. So unless you live in a Democrat district, what do they give a shit about telling you that your license is invalidated? They obviously didn’t care enough to stop this legislation. I don’t expect a single peep out of it, other than ‘We’re keeping men out of the women’s restroom!’ from the Republicans. ‘Yay! We won! We kept the men out!’ I don’t expect a single word of ‘Hey, this is what you need to do.’ 

You’re not expecting a ‘Know Your Rights’ infographic.

Hell no. 

This law also includes imposing these new limits on bathroom access.

The bathroom bounties. That’s a huge one that scares a lot of people. It’s not just the ideas. This is the fact that you can get a fine and be arrested for using the restroom, and people can sue. Nobody in Kansas knows how it’s going to be enforced. 

Do you expect to see, as we’ve seen elsewhere, situations where people are asked to ‘prove’ which bathroom they can go to?

I think a lot of people will not comply with the law. If you pass, you’re going to use the restroom you’re going to use. But, there will be malicious compliance. And Kansas is a right to carry state. Kansas is a stand your ground state. So who knows what’s going to happen. 

Are you scared? 

Am I scared for myself? No.

Are you scared for others? 

I’m scared for the gender nonconforming college kids, the teenagers and the adults who will never pass as cis without lots and lots of surgery, the folks who are obviously trans. Because trans is beautiful and you should have the right to live openly and authentically. And those people are being denied that. I’m being denied that as well, but we all are. 

How much of your decision to run for office was based in this increasingly hostile environment for trans people in your state?

Essentially all of it. I’ve known since I was a little kid that I wanted to be a legislator of some sort. I got to visit Washington, DC, as a kid and I thought ‘Oh, this would be so cool to speak for people.’ It’s not just running for me, it’s for marginalized Kansans. Right now, I work for the state. I do food stamp processing. I work with the poorest of the poor. It’s about helping everybody. Kansas came into the Union as a free state 165 years ago and we should be a free state for everybody, not just cishet white Republican men.

This law doesn’t just impact IDs going forward, as some other states have done, but reverses validity of current documentation. What do you make of this escalation?

They have nothing. The Republicans have nothing. They cannot legislate, they cannot lead, they cannot govern. All they have are societal issues that they think are a wedge and that’s what they go after because they have nothing of substance. Because transgender folks are approximately 1 percent of the population, who’s going to miss us?

The Kansas GOP is just running roughshod: move fast and break stuff. They’re going just as fast as they can and ramming terrible bills through the state. And a lot of it’s performative, and this feels very much performative, because I imagine most of them don’t really care. 

I don’t expect more transgender legislation this session. I do expect other states to go. ‘Hey, look what Kansas did.’ Now, there’ll be lawsuits. There’ll be lawsuits out the wazoo in Kansas and all the way up to the federal level.

There’s a general sense of confusion. It’s enacted; it’s rolled back; it’s going to this court. Maybe for a little bit, it’ll be allowed, but then who knows. What impact does this confusion have on Kansans?

It causes so much stress and anxiety of not knowing what’s going to happen—the turmoil of being in a whirlwind, in a Kansas tornado. Really, none of it matters. We’re trying to sort the fly shit from the pepper. It just blends in. You got to keep your eye on the prize and a bigger goal of freedom for everybody.

Can you tell me about choosing to stay?

The morning after Trump got elected the second time, we looked at all our options. We have enough privilege that we could leave if we wanted to. It wouldn’t be nice or fun, but we could get out. I said, ‘No.’ My wife desperately wanted to leave, still does. She’s not happy with me. But no, I want to fight for Kansas. I want to fight for the rights of queer people. If I weren’t staying to fight for that, I would go somewhere safe.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.     

2026-02-28 04:19:34

Word of the Reverend Jesse Louis Jackson’s death last week transported me back to the summer of 1987, when I was the editor of Mother Jones, and met him in person for the first time at the start of his second campaign for the presidency. One of his generation’s greatest orators, he blended Bible verses and calls for social justice like Dr. King. Invocations of self-affirmation, though, were distinctly Jesse. On Sesame Street he once taught a multiracial group of children to shout: “I AM SOMEBODY.” The son of an impoverished single mother from South Carolina, Jackson was a key figure in the struggle for racial equality by the time he was 23. Two decades later, he turned that slogan on himself by launching an improbable bid to run the country.

If you’d seen him thundering before massive crowds on television or in person during the ’60s and ’70s, as I had, you never forgot his booming baritone and rhythmic wordplay. So when I met him at his headquarters on the South Side of Chicago, Jackson was a familiar figure. At 6’4”, he towered over me, with the bruiser build of his father, a onetime boxer, and broad shoulders of the football player he’d been in college. That was the first impression—larger than life—no surprise. But the sound of his offstage voice was muted and even whispery, hard for my tape recorder to pick up. He was blunt about the business at hand. “What are we doing?” he rasped.

Related

Read Foster's 1987 cover story, "He Thinks He Can Win"

In the weeks ahead, Jackson would prove the most challenging subject for a profile I ever encountered. He had a skeptical squint and used it strategically, with long pauses and silence that telegraphed he wasn’t yet sure this interlocutor was worth his trouble. “That’s not fair! That’s not fair!” he grumbled when pressed on the wisdom of attacking the very media companies whose airwaves he needed to carry his campaign message to voters. “I have an analysis of the role the media play in the power structure of this country. Our press is privately owned by wealthy people who have substantial investments in the world economy. And they have power without accountability. Any publisher can make a political judgment and unleash the hounds. That power is real.” When I asked another question he didn’t like on our way to the airport, he began his reply, took a catnap midway, and roused himself at the terminal to finish—less gruff, without ever losing the thread. As we spent more time together—in town cars; on a flight from San Francisco to New York; and at many events—he seemed to unwrap himself, layer by layer, a little like the pastor portrayed in Purpose, the Pulitzer Prize–winning play more than loosely based on his sometimes tumultuous family life.

Jackson wasn’t the first Black person to mount a nationwide campaign for president. Shirley Chisholm, bold and brilliant, ran for the Democratic nomination in 1972. In 1984, he’d upped the ante, though, earning about 3.3 million votes, nearly one-in-five Democratic primary voters. He outlasted five famous officeholders, including a former nominee for president; an astronaut who became a senator from Ohio; the former governor of Florida; a well-known senator from South Carolina; and Sen. Alan Cranston, a political powerhouse from California. Former Vice President Walter Mondale won the nomination, but got flattened by President Ronald Reagan’s reelection apparatus in the general election.

It still irritated Jackson four years later that his first run should be referred to as a failure, just as he would bristle years later that his second run was also dismissed as a “failed campaign.” The biggest challenge he faced was turning an audacious move into something perceived as plausible. He had never been elected to anything before. (This was Before Times, when a candidate for president thought experience in public office mattered.) With just one Black senator out of 100, the field remained tilted against the very notion of Black eligibility for generations. (Four decades later there are five.) The first primary of the season, then, took place in the realm of the imagination.

Against that backdrop, coverage of his second campaign orbited around speculation about his underlying motivations. Headlines for stories ran along these lines: 

JESSE JACKSON
“What Does He Really Want?”

That was the headline we also used at Mother Jones when we put the accompanying story on the cover. “To win,” he kept repeating at campaign events. “Not as in place well, not as in good showing, not as in making a difference! Not nothing like that! As in win. We can win!” He knew his job as a candidate was to deny any doubts, but of course he carried them. Even one of his friends considered the presidential run a vanity project, telling Jackson he had zero chance. (He predicted, accurately, that all the other candidates would coalesce around an elected officeholder when they dropped out.) 

His status as a celebrity proved doubled-edged. Jackson drew high-wattage attention, which kept an underfunded campaign in the news, but celebrity treatment also yielded superficial coverage. On the flight, I watched this dynamic play out, listening as Jackson and his top aide labored over a major address he would give the next day. That speech heralded a set of detailed proposals he called “New Internationalism.” It was anti-protectionist and pro-worker, calling for a new global effort to prevent union-busting worldwide and to punish corporations for divesting in the U.S. He favored a nuclear freeze; reversal of Reagan’s tax cuts for the top 10 percent; revival of New Deal–era Public Works Administration and farm programs; reparations for slavery; a single-payer health care system; a 15 percent cut in military spending; ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment; and establishment of a Palestinian state—proposals that also proved ahead of their time.

After his powerful address to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People convention, he looked spent but reassured that he’d made clear his candidacy was no vanity project. Early the following morning, though, Jackson looked low ebb. A story about Sen. Joe Biden, one of his early primary adversaries, was on the front page of the New York Times and a shorter piece about his appearance at the NAACP convention was buried deep inside the paper. “I gave a major address about the uneven playing field that American workers are forced to play on, caused because multinational corporations have incentives to move capital abroad and no incentives to reinvest, redevelop and retrain workers,” he pointed out. “Yet the coverage was: ‘He came, they cheered, they sang, they prayed, he got rousing applause.’” That experience only deepened his skepticism about the willingness of journalists to treat him fairly.

“Why do you speak so much about the farm crisis?” I asked on the way back to the airport for his flight to Chicago. “Because I know that can turn its back on the family farmer, it’s open season on everybody,” he replied. That led to a kind of meditative free association about what had happened on the campaign trail so far. In Wisconsin, he mused, he’d seen posters for his campaign on porches where the Confederate flag also flew. I must have looked jolted, thinking of the physical attacks he and Dr. King withstood by people waving that flag. The sight of his own face beside the Confederate flag had not unsettled him. “A sense of gratification, a sense of vindication. A sense of joy,” Jackson explained. “To make progress we have to forgive each other, redeem each other, and focus on common ground.”

For a year he kept up the same kind of schedule and ended up earning nearly 7 million votes in 1988, more than twice what he achieved four years earlier, but short of the 8 million to 10 million votes he calculated he would need to become the nominee. His chief adversaries had been white men with distinguished careers in elected office—an eventual majority leader in the House of Representatives, three senators, and Gov. Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts. (Dukakis was nominated but then lost in a rout to Vice President George H.W. Bush.) Jackson showed up at the nominating convention, looking buoyant and sounding like a victor. He closed his speech there by thundering: “We must never surrender. America will get better and better. Keep hope alive!”

Twenty years later, on election night in November 2008, we stood in Chicago’s Grant Park, waiting for the Obama family to appear so a newly elected president—the first Black chief executive—could claim his victory. Nearby, Reverend Jackson clutched a small American flag and wept unashamedly. Watching him, I was carried back to the weeks we spent together on the campaign trail in 1987. During our final conversation on the road, in an unusually guarded off-the-record moment, Jackson admitted: “I know what my job is. It’s to bang on the door. Kick at the door. Bang on the door harder and push harder still. Someday, someone else will walk through it.”

Many of his contemporaries preceded him in death, too many of them assassinated in their prime. It’s a little miracle that Jackson, the target of so many threats, managed to play such a pivotal role in politics through six decades and survived into his 80s. When I moved to Chicago 20 years ago, it was easy to find an aging Jesse Jackson. If you joined, or reported on, any protest about injustice, odds were that you would bump into him. A rare neurological disease called supranuclear palsy left him wobbly on his feet and nearly mute for years. Critics, as always, considered him a showboat addicted to the limelight. Who cares? He showed up over and over in the right places anyway, even when there was little coverage.

“He was the free-est Black man I ever met,” Deborah Douglas, a Chicago journalist and friend of the family, told me. “And he outlived so many who were gunning to take him down.” For that last decade of his life, Jackson no longer mesmerized crowds with his boyish baritone. Whispers faded to a distant mumble. He marched as far as he could each time, then stood at the edge of the crowd, looking as if he was holding auditions for a successor. Whenever some emerging talent launched into a particularly effective peroration, he marked it with a tight smile and quick nod. Jesse Louis Jackson, still somebody, could see there was a new generation stepping up to speak in his place.

2026-02-28 03:20:18

Donald Trump’s media corporation told investors on Friday that it is considering spinning off his Truth Social platform into its own company—a move that comes after years of struggling to make money from the business. The president founded Trump Media and Technology Group in 2021, portraying it as a giant-killer that would one day displace the major social media platforms, streaming platforms like Netflix, and Amazon’s AWS web hosting platform—all of which the then-former president declared to be too woke.

So far, the company has achieved none of those things and has instead bounced from investment idea to investment idea—stockpiling Bitcoin, launching MAGA-themed financial products, and even announcing plans to merge with a fusion energy company and beginning to build power plants. This month, the company’s share price has flirted with all-time lows.

Trump’s company is expected to announce it’s fourth quarter earnings soon. Judging from the numbers it produced through the first three quarters of last year, the results could be unimpressive. In September, Trump Media said that it had pulled in only about $2.6 million in revenue in the first nine months of the year. And this time last year, the company reported losing $400.9 million in 2024—it attributed those losses in part to difficulties in going public that it blamed on the Biden administration. Meanwhile, the company reported just $3.6 million in revenue for all of 2024. For context, a well-run McDonald’s franchise averages a roughly similar level of revenue.

These numbers are not totally surprising. The company’s core product—Truth Social—is almost entirely reliant on one super-user: the president. To say the platform is rarely used besides Trump’s postings is an understatement. Last May, the platform reportedly had just 359,000 active users. For comparison, X has roughly 600 million active users. Left-leaning social media startup BlueSky, often derided for its relatively small user base, has around 3.5 million active users.

Trump Media and Technology Group doesn’t have much else in the way of products, which is not the way things were supposed to go. When it launched in 2021, the founders imagined the company would have $1.8 billion in revenue by this point and 69 million active users on Truth Social. They also envisioned a streaming service to rival Netflix and Amazon Prime. The streaming platform does exist, but Truth+ hardly compares to its competitors. The content selection is anemic and largely consists of videos that are available for free elsewhere—the most-watched list on the platform recently included an Elon Musk hagiography and a documentary about the Illuminati, both of which are available on YouTube. In the original investment pitch, the streaming business was supposed to have more than 32 million users by now.

With the original plans seemingly not materializing, the company has attempted other strategies. Earlier this year, it announced it would begin accumulating bitcoin, in an attempt to build a “bitcoin treasury”—essentially tying part of the company’s value to the then-increasing value of bitcoin. After purchasing more than 11,000 bitcoins for a total of $1.2 billion in September, the company initially saw its investment pay off. The price of bitcoin rose, and the company’s stockpile at one point was worth roughly $173 million more than what it had paid. But the price of bitcoin began collapsing in the fall. Trump Media sold off some of its bitcoin in late December; the rest is now worth about $658 million—a loss of roughly $428 million.

Trump still owns approximately 59 percent the company—a stake worth about $1.63 billion. But on paper, at least, those shares were once worth a whole lot more. The company began its life on the stock market in 2021 with a share price of $10 but quickly soared to nearly $100, before falling precipitously. It rebounded to above $60 in March 2024, as Trump was campaigning for president. It is currently languishing below $11 per share, and briefly dipped under $10 several times in the past week.

So an investor who bought Trump Media when it launched and has hung onto the shares since then has, at best, broken even. Unless, that is, they were able to purchase shares at a discount. Trump received his shares for free, meaning that as long as the shares are worth anything, he’ll make a profit.

2026-02-28 02:15:00

This story is published in partnership with The Florida Trib.

In a small, piercingly bright room inside a state prison in northeast Florida, Frank Walls was strapped to a gurney and injected three times: first with a sedative meant to render him unconscious, then a paralytic to prevent any visible movement, and finally potassium acetate to induce cardiac arrest.

Walls’ execution on December 18, 2025, capped Florida’s deadliest year in modern history. With 19 executions last year, Florida more than doubled its own record, and put more people to death than Texas, Alabama, and South Carolina combined. This execution spree came even as Florida’s lethal injection protocol has come under scrutiny, prompting fears that those executed are at risk of complications and needless suffering. 

In his final appeal, Walls asked Florida to review its three-step protocol, arguing that the way the state’s been carrying out executions would violate his Eighth Amendment right to be free of cruel and unusual punishment. His attorneys documented allegations that even though men in the death chamber couldn’t physically show the effects due to Florida’s three-drug protocol, some may have suffered and died with the feeling of drowning. And an analysis of court records, prison logs, redacted autopsy reports, and eyewitness testimonies by Mother Jones found documented issues in half the executions last year before Walls.

In at least nine executions from February to September 2025, there were signs of underdosings, the use of expired drugs, drug substitutions, or flaws in drug logs maintained by the Florida Department of Corrections. 

“Mr. Walls will die a needlessly cruel death if Florida insists on trying to kill him with Florida’s version of lethal injection,” wrote anesthesiologist Dr. Joel Zivot, who met Walls at the Florida state prison five months before his execution, in an affidavit Walls’ defense team submitted to the District Court in Tallahassee. 

Autopsy results for Walls, who was sentenced to death for the 1987 killings of an Air Force airman and his girlfriend, have not yet been released. But Zivot feared the three-drug protocol could cause pulmonary edema, a condition that’s been found in previous autopsies of people executed by Florida, and which Zivot said causes “the terror that accompanies drowning and asphyxiation as they choke on their own blood.” 

The Florida Attorney General’s office didn’t dispute Walls’ assertion that he could experience the sensation of drowning and gasping for air after the second drug is injected. They called it “irrelevant.” 

The state has been similarly unmoved by problems in recent executions. 

In June 2025, logs included in a lawsuit showed that one man was executed with half of the required amount of paralytic, and another man didn’t receive a full dose of the drug meant to swiftly induce cardiac arrest. 

The Florida Department of Corrections’ own records indicated that the execution team used expired sedatives in four deaths, raising concerns about the effectiveness of the drugs and the risk of complications, including severe pain. They also recorded the use of a local anaesthetic that’s not part of the state’s execution protocol, and listed dates for use of the drugs that don’t match execution dates. 

Each of these issues would violate Florida’s own protocol. Rather than order an investigation, the state’s governor and past presidential candidate, Republican Ron DeSantis, has already scheduled four executions this year.

The death penalty has waxed and waned in public opinion over the years, with botched executions, racial disparities, and wrongful convictions under scrutiny in recent years. Florida alone has seen at least 30 exonerations from its death row. 

But reviving the federal death penalty is a key tenet of President Donald Trump’s tough-on-crime agenda—and DeSantis has positioned Florida at the vanguard of the Trump-led Republican Party. His own political future is unclear after his failed presidential run, but he’s echoing loud and clear the president’s enthusiasm for harsh and swift executions. Florida is leading the death penalty’s resurgence.

“The exact reasons as to why DeSantis has chosen to ramp things up now—I don’t think we know,” said Hannah Gorman, who teaches death penalty law at Florida International University’s College of Law.

But she said the pace of Florida’s executions have ramifications nationally and internationally. In 2025, executions in the United States nearly doubled, and 40 percent of them were in Florida alone. 

“Florida is an outlier in the U.S.,” said Gorman. “But this is also a massive message coming out of America.” 

DeSantis has issued death warrants for 32 people since he took office in 2019, and 250 people remain on Florida’s death row. 

DeSantis’ office didn’t respond to a list of questions by Mother Jones. But in November 2025, DeSantis said he was doing his “part to deliver justice” to victims’ families by executing those who have been on death row for decades. And the governor has unusually broad power to enact this penalty: he both sets execution dates and proceeds over the clemency hearings that could halt his own execution orders.

The last review of lethal injection protocol by Department of Corrections Secretary Ricky Dixon was in February 2025, after the year’s executions had already begun. Dixon wrote in a letter to Gov. DeSantis that his department’s lethal injection procedure was in line with decency standards and “dignity of man.”  

“The foremost objective of the lethal injection process is a humane and dignified death,” Dixon wrote. “The process will not involve unnecessary lingering or the unnecessary or wanton infliction of pain and suffering.”

The one-page letter didn’t explain what Dixon’s review entailed, and the Florida Department of Corrections didn’t respond to questions about the review. 

A month after this letter was sent to Tallahassee, in March 2025, Florida executed Edward James. Prison drug logs disclosed in court records show James was given a local anesthetic—lidocaine—that’s not mentioned in the 14-page protocol signed off by Dixon. 

It’s unclear why that drug was administered or who authorized it. 

To Ron McAndrew, a former Florida State Prison warden who led Florida’s executions from 1996 to 1998 and oversaw three electric chair executions, Florida ought to slow down and examine its protocol before executing anyone else. 

Now an anti-death penalty advocate, McAndrew’s concerns extend beyond procedure. He worries about the toll on staff. The ones doing the “dirty work.” 

McAndrew has overseen and witnessed executions gone wrong. He was in charge in 1997, when Pedro Medina’s head burst into flames on the electric chair. The former warden said he wouldn’t wish that on anyone, especially prison staff. 

“To put a warden and a death team through 19 executions in one year was a horrible thing for the Governor to do,” McAndrew said. “These are the people that are going to wake up screaming in the middle of the night. These are the people that are going to suffer for the rest of their lives because the people they have killed are going to come visiting with them on a regular basis. They’re going to sit on the edge of their bed at night and talk to them.” 

In the past, botched executions or deviations from established execution procedures have prompted death penalty states to pause. Under Gov. Jeb Bush, Florida prison officials botched a lethal injection in 2006, and Bush temporarily halted executions. In Oklahoma, Republican Gov. Mary Fallin had to delay executions twice, after the botched execution of Clayton Lockett in 2014 and again after the revelation that the state substituted a new drug to stop Charles Warner’s heart in 2015. Warner’s final words, the Associated Press reported, were: “My body is on fire.” A grand jury investigation found “negligence” and serious errors in the state’s executions. 

In 2022 in Tennessee, Republican Gov. Bill Lee paused all executions and sought an independent review of its execution protocol over concerns about independent testing of the lethal drugs. When the review ended in 2024, citing fewer opportunities for mistakes, Tennessee moved from a three-drug protocol to a single drug, as at least 1o other states and the federal system have now done.  

Florida has been using the same three-drug combination since 2017. Florida’s governor, however, has yet to announce any investigation into this method or its recent executions, let alone slow his pace in signing death warrants, despite repeated pleas and public accounts. 

In 2025 alone, media coverage described troubling scenes in at least three executions in Florida. In April, Michael Tanzi’s chest heaved for about three minutes, the Associated Press reported. Tanzi was given the unauthorized sedative, lidocaine, prison logs later showed. 

During the execution of Thomas Gudinas in June, media reported that his eyes rolled back and his chest spasmed. Drug logs filed in court records showed that Gudinas was injected with half the amount of paralytic required by Florida’s protocol. Then in November, NBC News reported that former Marine Bryan Jennings’ chest heaved and his arms twitched. Jennings’ autopsy report found that he experienced pulmonary edema—which mirrors the feeling of drowning, and the condition a medical expert feared would happen to Walls at his December execution. 

After Walls’ execution, a spokesperson for the governor’s office said there were no complications with his three-step lethal injection. There were close to 30 witnesses in attendance, including relatives of Walls’ victims. The Pensacola News Journal reported “about six minutes of labored breathing.” 

And Maria DeLiberato, Walls’ former attorney and the legal and policy director for Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, said she saw Walls gasping and his chest heaving: “Like he’s choking.” What she witnessed, she said, didn’t match the state’s media briefing from the Raiford prison. 

“I thought something was wrong,” DeLiberato said.

In January, Gov. DeSantis signed his first death warrant of this year for Ronald Heath, who was convicted for the 1989 armed robbery and murder of a traveling salesman near University of Florida. A jury sentenced him to death in a 10–2 vote.

Unanimous jury decisions were not required when Heath was convicted. They became law in Florida after a landmark 2016 Supreme Court judgment, but in 2023, Gov. DeSantis signed a bill into law requiring only 8 of 12 jurors to vote for death. 

Heath’s final appeal urged the US Supreme Court to look into Florida’s three-step lethal injection method, citing previous use of expired drugs, inconsistent dosing and inaccurate logs about what happened in the death chamber. The state argued that the Eighth Amendment prohibits cruel and unusual punishment, “not inaccurate bookkeeping.”

The Supreme Court denied Heath’s request, and Heath’s execution was quick and without outward signs of complications, according to news coverage and a witness. Two weeks later, as Melvin Trotter’s execution date loomed for the murder of a grocery store owner in 1986, he asked for a stay of execution based on the risk of a mangled execution. Though the Supreme Court also rejected Trotter’s petition, this time, Justice Sonia Sotomayor expressed her concern about Florida’s “troubling” execution records. 

Sotomayor agreed with denying Trotter’s petition, but acknowledged that prisoners like him are caught in a catch-22: Because they don’t have enough evidence of cruel and unusual punishment, they have been denied the records they’d actually need to prove it. “The very reason” they are seeking these documents, she noted in a four-page statement, is to prove their claims. 

“By continuing to shroud its executions in secrecy, Florida undermines both the integrity of its own execution process and, potentially, this Court’s ability to ensure the State’s compliance with its constitutional obligations,” Sotomayor wrote. 

As Trotter was executed on February 24, he breathed heavily and his body twitched, PBS News reported. Details about the drugs used in Trotter’s execution won’t be revealed until the autopsy reports are made public. 

DeSantis has already ordered two more executions, Billy Kearse on March 3 and Michael King on March 17. And Sotomayor’s words are already reverberating on the busy death row. Within a day of Sotomayor’s statement, her critique of Florida’s secrecy had already been cited in a new appeal—and state officials had already dismissed the justice’s concerns as “speculation.”