Serial Killer Says Disability Should Halt Tonight’s Execution

Florida is set to execute serial killer Gary Ray Bowles on Thursday night, but he says his intellectual disability should keep him alive.

Yet Bowles, who brutally murdered six gay men in 1994, is pressing a stay application before a conservative U.S. Supreme Court majority that’s been increasingly skeptical of “last-minute” filings from death row prisoners.

So he’s trying to flip the delay issue on its head as his Sunshine State execution nears.

The 57-year-old’s intellectual disability claim “had been pending for nearly two years when the Governor signed his death warrant,” he says in his Aug. 16 filing. Therefore, the expedited nature of the litigation isn’t his fault, he says, but the fault of Gov. Ron DeSantis “signing a death warrant in the middle of Mr. Bowles’s intellectual disability litigation.”

Bowles needs five of the nine justices to vote to grant him a stay. No doubt, then, he’s mindful that the five Republican-appointed justices said in April that the court shouldn’t “reward those who interpose delay.”

The state of Florida is apparently mindful of this dynamic, too. In its opposition filing, it quotes that April decision authored by Gorsuch, Bucklew v. Precythe, emphasizing that “last-minute stays of execution ‘should be the extreme exception, not the norm.’”

But this “is not last-minute litigation initiated by Mr. Bowles,” said Dale Baich, a federal public defender who litigates capital cases and isn’t involved in this one. “As the case got traction and was heading for a hearing, the state threw it off-track by asking for an execution date.”

The state didn’t immediately respond to a message seeking comment on the case.

The Supreme Court has ruled that the Constitution bars executing the intellectually disabled, but litigation persists over how states have carried out that mandate.

None of the mental health professionals who’ve evaluated Bowles dispute his intellectual disability diagnosis, he says in the stay application. He criticizes Florida’s system that bars claims like his that were filed after a 2014 Supreme Court decision on capital punishment and intellectual disability in that state.

If the justices don’t take his case, Bowles says he’ll be executed “without any court having reviewed his intellectual disability evidence, or considered on the merits whether he is in fact intellectually disabled and therefore ineligible for execution.”

The state says Bowles isn’t intellectually disabled and the justices should reject his appeal because his claim was properly denied under Florida’s system.