Florida: Michael Tanzi executed – the US state is currently carrying out death sentences on a monthly basis
On Tuesday evening, 48-year-old Michael Tanzi was executed by lethal injection in the US state of Florida.
He was sentenced to death for kidnapping, raping and strangling a 49-year-old woman during her lunch break in 2000. Tanzi also admitted that he had murdered a 37-year-old woman in Massachusetts a few months earlier.
He used his last words to express his regret and apologize for his actions.
Tanzi’s lawyers had argued in vain that their client had evolved and that he could not be executed without risk due to his obesity.
Tanzi’s lawyers also describe his childhood as a time of loss, abuse and lack of stability. They say he was sexually molested by a childhood friend and physically and emotionally abused by his father.
When his father was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, he became increasingly violent toward him. According to court documents, Tanzi became increasingly aggressive, angry and difficult as a result of the abuse, according to his mother.
One of Tanzi’s friends testified that Tanzi’s father once slammed the boy’s head against the side of a truck. According to court documents, his mother was “not home that often” in the meantime.
When Tanzi was about eleven years old, his mother tried to take him to a meeting for victims of sexual abuse, but he vehemently resisted. “He didn’t want to face it,” she said. “He didn’t want to talk to anyone about what had happened to him.”
It was the third death sentence carried out in Florida this year – the next execution is already scheduled for May 1.