Florida death row inmate wants DeSantis to attend his pending execution

Dennis Michael Sochor, convicted of strangling an 18-year-old woman he met at a New Year’s celebration in a Broward County bar 44 years ago, is scheduled to die by lethal injection Tuesday at Florida State Prison.

His last wish?

To have Gov. Ron DeSantis personally observe his execution up close and personal.

“Dennis very clearly has said that more so than even asking the governor to stop his execution, he’s asking for the governor’s attendance at his execution. Because he thinks that if the governor had to attend his execution, that that would be make a lot of difference for the pace in which he’s handling down these executions,” the Rev. Jeff Hood, founder of the Execution Intervention Project and spiritual adviser to Sochor, said Friday during a Zoom conference.

If Sochor’s execution takes place as scheduled, he would become the 10th person executed by the State of Florida this year and the 29th since January 2025 — far more than any other state in the nation in that time.

The governor has said little about the flurry of death row warrants he has signed in the past couple of years.

Journalist Pamela Colloff from The New York Times Magazine recently wrote that the secrecy surrounding his decisions on setting executions in Florida “has left victims’ families, prisoners and their lawyers searching for clues about what principles, if any, guide DeSantis’s selection process.”

Colloff went on to write, “How long a prisoner has spent on death row does not appear to be a deciding factor; DeSantis has bypassed prisoners who committed their crimes as far back as the 1970s, scheduling the executions of men convicted of murders committed decades later.”

According to court documents, Dennis Sochor and his brother met Patricia Gifford, 18, and a friend at the Banana Boat in Broward County to celebrate New Year’s Eve 1981.

Sochor has confessed that when Gifford refused to have sex with him later that evening, he became angry, choked her until she died, and disposed of her body, which has never been found. He was indicted for first-degree murder and kidnaping and, after a jury trial, was found guilty of each offense, and recommended for execution by a Broward jury in 1989 by a vote of 10-2.

Hood said Friday that Sochor, 74, has either sent or given to prison staff a letter to Patricia Gifford’s family “expressing his remorse and sorrow for the pain he has caused.”

He added that Sochor has told law enforcement officers “multiple times” that he was too drunk to remember where he left Gifford’s body. “He wants  people to know that if he could help locate the body, of course he would.”

After DeSantis signed a death warrant for his execution in June, Sochor filed his sixth postcondition motion in the Circuit Court for Broward County raising two legal claims: the state’s violation of its obligation to disclose exculpatory evidence, and a facial challenge to Florida’s lethal injection protocol. The trial judge denied both claims as untimely, procedurally barred, and without merit.

The Florida Supreme Court followed up this week and denied a motion by Sochor’s attorneys for a stay of execution and declined to hold oral arguments or entertain a motion for rehearing.

The surge in executions in Florida comes at a time when public support for the death penalty is at 52%, according to a Gallup survey taken last October. That’s the lowest since 1972, when 50% were in favor.

“We know that these executions are taking place at an enormous clip,” Rev. Hood said Friday. “We know that Gov. DeSantis is continually signing [death]warrants…and so I think it’s important to point out that his pen is a weapon and he is firing it indiscriminately.”

The governor’s office did not respond to a request for comment.