A panel of experts tasked with deciding if a Florida man is sufficiently cognitively aware to be put to death by the state next Wednesday has seemingly blown its deadline for reporting its findings to Gov. Ron DeSantis.

Or maybe not.

It’s possible that the panel of doctors reported its findings on Oct. 2 to DeSantis, whose office has chosen not to make the findings public yet – or tell Thompson’s attorneys, who have said they are in the dark.

Both the governor’s office and the state attorney general have ignored questions from The Florida Trib about the status of 74-year-old William Lee Thompson and the outcome of the panel’s finding.

If nothing else, the legal machinations surrounding Thompson’s execution have become peculiarly muddled as the clock of his life ticks down. Currently, Thompson’s execution, scheduled for Oct. 13, has been paused pending the governor’s own findings in response to the three-doctor panel’s report, Thompson’s attorneys believe. 

The executive order commissioning the panel did not include a deadline for the governor’s findings to be issued.

Aside from whether Thompson lives or dies, at issue are two legal tenets: One is that a person being executed must be cognitively aware of what is happening to them and why.

The other is that the circumstances surrounding the taking of a life by the state in the name of its citizenry should not be cloaked in secrecy.

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. The other state, Pennsylvania, hasn’t executed a citizen in nearly 30 years. Then, in 2022, DeSantis expanded the secrecy when he signed a bill that exempts the Florida Department of Corrections from having to disclose the names of companies that provide lethal injection drugs or the person administering them.

In Thompson’s case, the governor convened the panel after forensic neuropsychologist Robert H. Ouaou, wrote in a report that Thompson showed a “profound level” of cognitive impairment. 

“He did not recognize he had been sentenced to death and was unable to demonstrate meaningful insight into his present condition,” Ouaou wrote. It was the fourth time since 2015 that Ouaou evaluated Thompson. 

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 in 1978 was again sentenced to die. Surace was found guilty of second-degree murder after Thompson admitted being primarily responsible. Surace was sentenced to 203 years and died in prison in 1993, according to the Miami Herald. Thompson has been awaiting his fate for nearly 50 years – since before executions resumed after a four-year pause prompted by a U.S. Supreme Court decision.

Florida and federal law prohibit executing people with intellectual disabilities, but Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty noted four people in 2025 who had documented intellectual disability claims. Each claim was dismissed not on the merits, but because of procedural failures by the appellant. 

Thompson has been 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 Sept. 10 on the hospital’s understanding that he would return to the prison’s medical unit. 

But Thompson was removed from the medical unit less than 24 hours later when DeSantis signed his death warrant.

Thompson’s attorneys tried to compel the state to return him to a facility where he could get medical care, but the request was denied. Since Sept. 11, he’s been the first known gravely ill prisoner to live on death watch, a specialized and highly restrictive housing unit in Starke, Florida, 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. 

DeSantis then issued a temporary stay of execution based in part on Ouaou’s findings and commissioned doctors Wade Myers, Tonia Werner and Emily Lazarou to do their own evaluation. It’s the third time this group of three has been called to evaluate someone’s mental state ahead of their execution. The first was for Duane Owen in 2023 and then Jeffery Hutchinson in 2025, both of whom were put to death. 

Lazarou was criticized before Owen’s execution when she commented on a Facebook post about a vigil for him, saying that support should be shown for his victims instead. When questioned about the post by a reporter from the Tampa Bay Times, she said she didn’t know her “comment on the Facebook post was public.”

Owen’s attorneys argued that all three panelists were combative while evaluating Owen.

Prior to 2023, the last time a panel was called was in 2013, according to Tracking Florida’s Death Penalty, a blog run by attorney Melanie Verdecia, who has done extensive pro bono litigation in death penalty cases and is one of the attorneys who fought to have Thompson returned to the medical unit after his death warrant was signed. That panel determined Marshall Gore was competent and he, too, was executed. 

Another Morbid Milestone in Florida

If the stay is lifted, Thompson will be the second death carried out by the state that day. Six hours before he was scheduled to die, James Robertson, 62, is to be put to death. 

James Robertson strangled his cellmate, Frank Hart, on Dec. 10, 2008, while he was at the Charlotte Correctional Institution. Prosecutors said he tied several socks together and used them to choke Hart. According to investigators, Robertson said he was tired of being in prison and killed Hart so he would be charged with first-degree murder and sentenced to die. 

He waived all of his appeals following his sentencing.

A double execution was once a grim milestone for Florida, but this is the second such event this year, which hadn’t occurred for six decades. 

DeSantis, who executed two people in his first year as governor and none the next year, has dramatically accelerated the pace. He set a modern single-year state record with 19 executions in 2025. If Thompson dies as originally scheduled on Oct. 13, that would make a total of 18, with more upcoming on the calendar.

Since last year, DeSantis 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, six states have executed 29 inmates who were at least 62, and 69% of those executions happened in Florida.

Nichole Manna is The Florida Trib’s senior investigative reporter. You can reach her at nichole.manna@floridatrib.org.