Florida prison officials are refusing to give a “profoundly sick” 74-year-old man medical care while he waits for his scheduled execution October 13, drawing objections from more than 100 doctors. The man, William Lee Thompson, is the first known gravely ill prisoner who has been forced to live on death watch, a specialized and highly restrictive housing unit in Starke where inmates with signed death warrants await their execution – and a place where medical care doesn’t exist to the level advocates say Thompson requires in the final stages of his life. 

Although Death Row inmates routinely file late-hour appeals, Thompson’s is unusual in that even his own advocates don’t view this as an effort to spare him from death.

“I think what’s important is that this is not an execution … This is death by medical neglect,” said Maria Deliberato, legal director at Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, adding that there’s “no question that he is constitutionally entitled to appropriate medical care.”

“You cannot put someone in prison and then neglect their medical needs because they don’t have the ability to get their own treatment,” she said. 

Thompson’s attorneys filed an emergency motion in federal court on Saturday that asked the state to relocate him to a medical facility either within the prison system or an outside hospital. U.S. District Judge Jordan E. Pratt denied the motion on Monday.

DeSantis, who has dramatically accelerated Florida’s executions, has overseen executions of numerous elderly prisoners, including 80-year-old Dominick Occhicone, who was the oldest person in Florida’s modern history to be executed. Since 2025, seven states have executed 29 inmates who were at least 62-years-old and 69% of those executions happened in Florida, according to Death Penalty Information Center data reviewed by The Trib. 

On Wednesday, more than 100 medical providers who reviewed Thompson’s case will urge DeSantis to stop Thompson’s execution and instead allow him to live out what they say are the final stages of physical and cognitive decline while under medical watch. 

“We do not share a single position on the death penalty,” the letter says. “Some of us support capital punishment, while others oppose it. Nor do we ask you to reconsider Mr. Thompson’s conviction. We are united by a foundational principle of medicine: Every human being, regardless of circumstance, is entitled to humane treatment, appropriate medical care, and dignity at the end of life. The medical facts presented by Mr. Thompson’s attorneys describe a profoundly sick man experiencing multisystem organ failure.”

Thompson was diagnosed with dementia and has required extensive hospital care in recent months for sepsis, systolic heart failure, severe malnutrition and multiple decubitus ulcers. He was released from UF Health Shands Hospital in Gainesville on September 10 on the hospital’s understanding that he would return to the prison’s medical unit. 

But less than 24 hours later, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed Thompson’s death warrant, which resulted in Thompson’s removal from the prison’s medical facility. 

Florida is one of two states that give governors executive power to decide when and whose death warrant to sign. There is no court scheduling or public explanation for the timing or the name chosen.

His office declined to comment on the alleged medical neglect or answer a question about why he signed Thompson’s warrant, instead sending The Florida Trib a statement that said, “William Lee Thompson, a convicted kidnapper, rapist, and murderer, was sentenced to death for his heinous crimes on September 20, 1978. Governor DeSantis signed his death warrant on September 11, 2026, and he is scheduled to be executed on October 13, 2026.”

Thompson’s attorneys, Melanie Verdecia and Marie-Louise Samuels Parmer, wrote that Thompson was evaluated by a forensic neuropsychologist on Sept. 14, and that he was found shackled to a wheelchair while blood oozed from medical staples in his head. The neuropsychologist concluded that Thompson does not recognize what is happening, which is a requirement to execute someone under Florida law. 

Thompson will be evaluated again on Wednesday. 

“Right now, the most immediate question is whether Florida will provide Mr. Thompson with the medical care and basic human dignity he so clearly needs. I hope this case also forces all of us to consider what kind of state we want Florida to be – and what we are willing to permit our government to do in our name,” said Grace Hanna, Executive Director of FADP.

In 2025, DeSantis signed death warrants and executed 19 people, setting a record for the state and accounting for more than 40% of executions across the country. Thompson is the seventeenth of 18 death warrants DeSantis has signed this year, and if the governor keeps the pace he has set, 2026 will be the deadliest for Florida’s Death Row. 

Thompson was convicted in March 1976 of killing 23-year-old Sally Ivester. Thompson, then 23, and Rocco James Surace, then 30, beat Ivester with chains, burned her with cigarettes and assaulted her at a hotel in Miami. She died of shock and internal injuries.

Both men pleaded guilty to the murder and received death sentences. Both were granted new trials after they appealed. Thompson again pleaded guilty and was sentenced to die for a second time in 1978. Surace was found guilty of second-degree murder after Thompson accepted all the blame. He was sentenced to 203 years and died in prison in 1993, according to the Miami Herald. 

Thompson was set to be executed in 1982 and 1987, but the executions were stayed, and in 1987, Thompson’s death sentence was overturned again. Two years later, a jury again recommended that Thompson be executed, and a judge sent him to Florida’s Death Row for the third time.

Nichole Manna is The Florida Trib’s Senior Investigative Reporter.