Florida: Edward Zakrzewski executed – although almost half of the jurors were in favor of life imprisonment
On Thursday evening, 60-year-old Edward Zakrzewski was executed by lethal injection in the US state of Florida. He was sentenced to death for killing his 34-year-old wife and their children, a seven-year-old son and a five-year-old daughter, in June 1994.
His wife, a South Korean woman, wanted to divorce him and take the children back to her home country. In a knee-jerk reaction, Zakrzewski obtained a machete, crowbar and rope after learning of his wife’s plan and used them to commit the crime.
He then fled to Hawaii and went into hiding there. Four months later, the case of the Zakrzewski family murders received widespread public attention through the US series “Unsolved Mysteries”. Edward Zakrzewski turned himself in to the police and pleaded guilty.
For the three murders, he was sentenced to death in two cases by the jury with only 7 to 5 votes, in the third case the jury voted 6 to 6, which amounted to a decision for a life sentence.
Nowhere else in the USA is the threshold for imposing a death sentence so low – a minimum of 8 votes is currently required in Florida, while other states often require a unanimous jury vote.
The extremely close result in the Zakrzewski case may have its background in the fact that the perpetrator suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder as a war veteran and committed the cruel act in an exceptional emotional situation.
As the organization Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty explains in a statement, Zakrzewski deeply regretted his crime and has done a lot for his fellow prisoners and also his friends in the free world in the more than 30 years on death row.
It was the ninth execution in Florida this year and two more are already scheduled for August. Governor Ron DeSantis is currently signing execution orders every two weeks, leading to an unprecedented wave of executions in Florida.
Source:
https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/07/31/floridas-execution-of-man-who-killed-family-with-machete-is-a-record/85463840007/
https://www.fadp.org/statement-on-the-execution-of-edward-zak-zakrzewski/