THE CASE AGAINST EXECUTING DUSTY RAY SPENCER

A Comprehensive Argument for Mercy

Execution Scheduled: June 25, 2026 | Florida State Prison, Starke

Introduction: Dusty Ray Spencer’s is a Life Worth Reconsidering

Dusty Ray Spencer, a 74-year-old military veteran, is scheduled to die by lethal injection on June 25, 2026. He has spent more than three decades on Florida’s death row. The crime he committed was violent and real. Karen Spencer is dead and nothing will change that. This argument does not deny the gravity of what happened on January 18, 1992.

But gravity of crime is not the only measure of whether a state should take a human life. The question before us now…the question that must be put to anyone with power to intervene…is whether the execution of this particular man, at this particular moment, constitutes justice or whether it constitutes something else: the mechanical completion of a legal process whose foundations were flawed from the beginning.

The record reveals a case riddled with constitutional infirmity, suppressed mitigation, a nonunanimous jury and a man sentenced to die without any jury at all. It reveals a human being whose capacity for violence was inseparable from devastating, documented mental illness and chronic alcoholism that impaired him to a degree that the prosecution’s own experts found compelling…a degree that multiple Florida Supreme Court justices also found compelling. It reveals a 74-year-old man who has served over thirty years, who has lived, aged, changed in ways the legal system is not designed to measure.

What follows is the strongest possible case…grounded in the actual record…for why Dusty Ray Spencer’s execution should be stopped.

I. The Death Sentence Was Imposed on Dusty Ray Spencer Without a Jury

This is the most fundamental fact in the Spencer case and the most underappreciated: Dusty Ray Spencer was ultimately sentenced to death without any jury deliberation.

After the Florida Supreme Court vacated his original death sentence in 1994…holding that the trial court had improperly found the cold, calculated and premeditated (CCP) aggravating factor…improperly rejected two statutory mental mitigating circumstances…the case was remanded for reconsideration. What happened next is extraordinary: the trial court resentenced Spencer to death without empaneling a new jury. A judge alone, relying on the existing record, again imposed the ultimate penalty.

Justice Pariente, in her dissent in the Hurst-related proceedings, identified this as the central injustice of the case:

“Spencer’s case involves the quintessential Hurst error…a defendant being sentenced to death without trial by jury, as guaranteed by the United States and Florida Constitutions… Ironically, if this Court had reversed for a new penalty phase rather than remanding the case for ‘reconsideration’ of the aggravation and mitigation by the trial court, Spencer might be entitled to Hurst relief.”

The original jury that did hear penalty evidence recommended death by only a 7-5 vote…a bare majority, five jurors short of unanimity. That narrow, divided recommendation was already constitutionally suspect under the principles the Supreme Court would later articulate in Hurst v. Florida (2016). The Florida Supreme Court denied Spencer relief only because his conviction was finalized before the Hurst cutoff date…not because the constitutional problem was any less real in his case.

The United States is executing a man who was never sentenced to death by a unanimous jury…and who, at resentencing, faced no jury at all. The constitutional guarantee of jury determination in capital cases existed as a principle long before Hurst made it explicit. Spencer’s death sentence was built on a foundation that the highest courts of Florida and the United States have since recognized as inadequate.

II. Severe Mental Illness and Chronic Alcoholism Fundamentally Compromised Dusty Ray Spencer’s Culpability

The penalty phase record in the Spencer case is remarkable for what it actually shows: two expert witnesses…a clinical psychologist…a neuropsychopharmacologist…providing detailed, uncontroverted testimony that Spencer suffered from a paranoid personality disorder with borderline traits, chronic substance abuse dating to early adolescence…an acute biochemical impairment at the time of the murder that rendered his capacity to conform his conduct to the law substantially compromised.

This was not mere defense advocacy. The Florida Supreme Court itself accepted it. In its 1994 opinion vacating the original sentence, the court found that the expert testimony was “uncontroverted” and that the trial court had erred in rejecting it as “speculative and conclusory.” The court specifically found that the experts had based their opinions on “a battery of psychological and personality tests, clinical interviews with Spencer, examination of evidence in this case and a review of Spencer’s life history, school records and military records.”

What those experts found:

• Spencer was sexually abused by his father beginning in early adolescence…precisely the period when he began using alcohol heavily to cope, drinking to intoxication at age fourteen.
• Alcohol abuse during the final years of brain development altered his neurological formation: the chronic drinking during late adolescence interfered with “the final growth interconnectedness of nerves within the brain,” with permanent consequences for how he processed emotion and stress.
• He presented as classically overcontrolled: passive, submissive, emotionally isolated, avoiding conflict at nearly all costs…but with a catastrophic vulnerability under extreme stress to what the psychologist called an “explosion” of dysregulated behavior he could not remember afterward.
• At the time of the murder, his blood alcohol level was technically zero…but as the neuropsychopharmacologist explained in detail, chronic alcoholics in withdrawal do not return to cognitive competency simply because a breathalyzer reads zero. His thinking process was biochemically disordered and the withdrawal from constant heavy drinking compounded his paranoid disorder catastrophically.
• The psychologist testified that Spencer entered a dissociative state during the murder itself…that he “wasn’t even able to remember it” and “wasn’t aware of what he was doing at the time he was doing it.” The experts found this amnesia genuine.

The state never disputed any of this with expert testimony of its own. Its only rebuttal was to cherry-pick quotations and present them out of context…a practice the defense brief documented at length…which the Florida Supreme Court implicitly validated when it found the mitigation real…the original rejection of it erroneous.

In the resentencing, the judge found both statutory mental mitigators to be present. He gave them only “some weight.” He gave the nonstatutory mitigators…including Spencer’s honorable military service, documented sexual abuse as a child and good work record…”very little weight.” The question is not whether mitigation existed. It clearly did and the court acknowledged it. The question is whether the weight assigned to it was constitutionally adequate…and whether a jury, not a judge alone, should have made that determination.

III. The Prosecution and Trial Court Systematically Distorted the Record

The appellate brief filed by Spencer’s public defender, James Wulchak, is one of the most methodically documented records of prosecutorial overreach in Florida capital jurisprudence. Page after page catalogs specific misquotations, decontextualized testimony and outright factual errors in the state’s version of events…errors that migrated from the prosecution’s brief directly into the trial court’s sentencing order.

A non-exhaustive list of documented distortions:

• The state claimed the victim was stabbed “four or five times in the chest.” The medical record shows two penetrating stab wounds to the chest (one to the sternum, one to the lung), with superficial cuts to the face and arms. The trial court’s sentencing order later stated five stab wounds.
• The state claimed the psychologist opined Spencer “had a poor work history.” The actual testimony said Spencer “probably has not achieved to his potential” and “would have a poor work history, relating to his ability”…a nuanced psychological observation about capability versus achievement, not a character attack. The trial court borrowed the state’s distorted version.
• The state claimed psychologist Burch “only spent three hours” with Spencer. She spent two full days…seven hours of psychological testing plus three hours of clinical history…and reviewed police reports, autopsy reports, photographs, witness interviews and work summaries from the neuropsychopharmacologist.
• The state presented “James Butcher, Ph.D.” as a contradicting expert. He is a computer program…a software algorithm for interpreting MMPI data that the neuropsychopharmacologist explicitly testified “may have nothing to do with your client” and “on its own, doesn’t mean anything.” The state sought to put algorithmic output on the same level as two days of clinical evaluation.
• The state characterized Burch as finding Spencer “could have been contemplating” the murder as early as December. Her actual testimony was she could not rule out that he “thought about and fantasized” about it…an enormously different legal and psychological statement and one she specifically distinguished from premeditated planning, because Spencer’s disordered thinking made rational planning impossible.

These distortions were not incidental. They formed the factual foundation for the sentencing court’s conclusions. When a death sentence is built on a distorted record, the finality that ordinarily protects judgments becomes an argument for injustice, not for it.

IV. Significant Judicial Dissent Has Consistently Questioned Dusty Ray Spencer’s Sentence

It is not merely advocates who have found the Spencer sentence troubling. Florida Supreme Court justices themselves have repeatedly said so…in opinions attached to the very decisions that affirmed his sentence.

Justice Kogan, in the original 1994 appeal, would have reduced the sentence to life imprisonment outright. He wrote that the strong case for mental mitigation and the absence of cold calculated premeditation made the death penalty disproportionate, drawing a direct comparison to Santos v. State…a factually analogous case in which the Florida Supreme Court ultimately reversed the death penalty. He called a remand “a useless act” because, in his view, death clearly could not be proportional.

In the 1996 resentencing appeal, Chief Justice Kogan again dissented, this time as the court’s senior member, again finding the sentence disproportionate…citing the trial court’s own findings of extreme mental and emotional disturbance, substantial impairment, paranoid personality disorder, sexual abuse as a child…honorable military service.

And in the most recent chapter…the Hurst-era proceedings…Justice Pariente wrote with particular force that Spencer’s case represented the very scenario Hurst was meant to address: a defendant sentenced to death without the constitutionally required jury determination. She would have granted him a new penalty phase.

Multiple justices across multiple decades have looked at this case and said: this is wrong. They were constrained by precedent. Clemency authority is not.

V. Dusty Ray Spencer Is 74 Years Old…A Different Man Than the One Who Committed This Crime

Dusty Ray Spencer was 40 years old when he killed Karen Spencer. He is now 74. He has spent more than half of his life on death row.

The psychological profile drawn in his penalty phase…overcontrolled hostility erupting under catastrophic domestic stress, fueled by chronic alcohol abuse that began in adolescence as a response to sexual trauma…describes a person shaped by conditions that can themselves change. He has not had access to alcohol in three decades. He has aged out of the volatile emotional states that the experts identified as his specific pathway to violence. The demographic research on elderly incarcerated individuals is unambiguous: recidivism rates for men over 65 are among the lowest of any population.

If the mitigating factors at sentencing were real…the Florida Supreme Court said they were…then thirty-four years of additional time, sobriety, aging…institutional structure constitute additional mitigation the original sentencer never weighed and could never have weighed.

There is no public safety argument for this execution. There is no penological purpose served by lethal injection that imprisonment until natural death does not serve equally well for a 74-year-old man in state custody. The only argument for execution at this stage is retributive. That argument must be weighed against everything else in this record.

VI. The Trial’s Prosecutorial Misconduct Claims Were Never Fully Remedied

In postconviction proceedings, Spencer raised substantial claims of prosecutorial misconduct at both the guilt and penalty phases. The Eleventh Circuit granted a Certificate of Appealability on the prosecutorial misconduct claims, finding them significant enough to certify for federal appellate review. The Eleventh Circuit ultimately affirmed the denial of relief in 2010…but the fact that federal judges found the claims worthy of certification at all reflects the magnitude of the constitutional questions surrounding his trial.

The record of the trial court’s handling of the evidence…the decontextualized expert testimony, the factual errors in the sentencing order, the prosecution’s sustained mischaracterization of the psychological evidence…represents a pattern, not isolated error. The system that produced this death sentence was not operating at its best. It was operating at something considerably less.

VII. Florida’s Execution Rate and the Risk of Systematic Error

Florida executed 19 people in 2025…a modern-era record, accounting for 40 percent of all executions in the United States. Spencer would be the eighth execution of 2026, with his warrant signed before the sixth had been carried out. This pace…unprecedented in the post-Furman era…warrants scrutiny.

Speed is not a virtue in capital cases. The constitutional safeguards built into the appellate process exist precisely because the risk of error in death cases is real and the consequences irreversible. A state executing this many people this quickly is a state where the margin of error shrinks with each warrant signed. Dusty Spencer’s case…with its documented constitutional infirmities, its judicial dissents, its nonunanimous jury, its resentencing without any jury…is exactly the kind of case that deserves the most careful, unhurried scrutiny, not acceleration.

VIII. The Moral Argument

Beyond the legal arguments, there is a moral argument and it does not require agreement with abolition to make it.

Dusty Ray Spencer was himself a victim before he became a perpetrator. He was sexually abused as a child. He turned to alcohol at fourteen to manage pain he had no other tools to address. That alcohol reshaped his brain during its most formative period. His violence was not random, not predatory, not targeted at strangers. It was rooted in a domestic relationship consumed by conflict, distorted by his paranoid personality disorder…his impaired judgment…culminating in an explosion that his own brain apparently could not record.

None of that excuses what he did. Karen Spencer is dead. Timothy Johnson witnessed his mother’s murder as a teenager. Those are irrevocable facts. But a moral accounting does not allow us to consider only half the story. The man who killed Karen Spencer was a broken man, broken by forces that began before he had any capacity to choose them. A state that kills broken people who kill does not necessarily produce justice. It may only produce more killing.

An 74-year-old man…sober for decades, aged past the neurological volatility that the experts identified as his specific pathway to violence…will die by lethal injection on June 25 unless someone intervenes. He will die having been sentenced by a 7-5 jury and resentenced by a judge alone. He will die for a crime whose aggravation the Florida Supreme Court partially rejected and whose mitigation the court partially acknowledged. He will die in a constitutional environment that has since recognized the very flaws in his case as constitutional violations…and denied him relief only on a technicality of timing.

Conclusion: The Case for Intervention on Behalf of Dusty Spencer

The strongest possible argument to stop the execution of Dusty Spencer is not a single argument. It is the convergence of all of the above:

• He was sentenced to death without any jury at resentencing and by a divided non-unanimous jury in the original proceeding…a constitutional infirmity that post-Hurst Florida has recognized as fatal in other cases.
• Uncontroverted expert testimony established severe mental illness and biochemical impairment at the time of the crime, with the Florida Supreme Court itself finding that the trial court erred in rejecting it.
• The factual record on which his death sentence rests was systematically distorted by the prosecution and adopted uncritically by the sentencing court.
• Multiple Florida Supreme Court justices across multiple decades have found the sentence troubling and would have reversed it.
• He is 74 years old, has been incarcerated for over 34 years and presents no plausible ongoing danger to anyone.
• His execution serves no purpose…deterrence, incapacitation or rehabilitation…that a commuted sentence of life imprisonment would not equally serve.

Mercy is not forgiveness. It is not exoneration. It is the recognition that justice is something more complicated and more demanding than the mechanical completion of a legal sentence…particularly one built on the foundations that this one was.

The case for stopping this execution is not based on the claim that Dusty Ray Spencer is innocent or that Karen Spencer’s death was anything other than a tragedy. It is based on the claim that the process that produced this outcome was constitutionally and morally insufficient, that the man facing execution is not the same man who committed the crime…that killing him on June 25 will not make anything more just…only more final.