Ronald Heath, 64, was put to death by lethal injection Tuesday evening at Florida State Prison for a 1989 murder outside Gainesville.
Heath was pronounced dead at 6:12 p.m. following a three-drug injection. He was the first inmate executed this year by the state after Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a modern record of 19 death warrants in 2025.
The state action follows the U.S. Supreme Court denying the latest appeals by Heath’s attorneys on Tuesday.
Last week, the Florida Supreme Court denied Heath’s motion for a stay of execution.
The Florida Conference of Catholic Bishops also last week asked DeSantis to commute Heath’s sentence to life in prison without parole. The conference has unsuccessfully made similar requests before executions throughout the year.
“We appeal to you that it is possible both to achieve the purposes of punishment and to exercise mercy,” wrote Michael Sheedy, the conference’s executive director.
DeSantis signed the death warrant for Heath on Jan. 9 for the May 24, 1989 murder of Michael Sheridan, who was shot, stabbed and robbed in a wooded area south of Gainesville. Heath and his brother, Kenneth Heath, met Sheridan at the Purple Porpoise Lounge in Gainesville before the men drove to the wooded area to smoke marijuana.
In a 1991 order sentencing Ronald Heath to death, then-Circuit Judge Robert P. Cates wrote that the Heath brothers tried to rob Sheridan. The order said Ronald Heath instructed his brother to shoot Sheridan, who was initially wounded in the chest.
“Sheridan sat down and began struggling to remove his jewelry and his wallet,” the judge wrote. “Perceiving that Sheridan’s movements were futile and dilatory, Ronald Heath pulled out a hunting knife and stabbed Sheridan in the neck. Ronald attempted to slit Sheridan’s throat but found the task too difficult with a dull knife. He sawed at Sheridan’s neck but was unable to consummate the kill. Thereupon Ronald Heath instructed Kenneth Heath to kill Sheridan with the gun. Kenneth Heath fired two fatal bullets into the brain of Michael Sheridan causing his death.”
The sentencing order said the Heath brothers used the victim’s credit cards to buy clothes and jewelry at the Oaks Mall in Gainesville, and a police investigation was prompted by a failed effort to use one of the cards to buy a car stereo.
Heath was previously sentenced to 30 years for murder in 1977. He was paroled in 1988.
DeSantis has also signed warrants for the executions of Melvin Trotter on Feb. 24 and Billy Leon Kearse on March 3.
Trotter, 65, was sentenced to death in the June 1986 murder of Virgie Langford, 70, who was found by a truck driver on the floor at the back of Langford’s Grocery Store in Palmetto.
Kearse, 53, was convicted of killing Fort Pierce police officer Danny Parrish during a 1991 traffic stop.
DeSantis set a modern-era record in 2025 with 19 executions.
–Jim Turner, News Service of Florida
TR says
Good riddens. Poor lawyer lost an income stream with every inmate on death row being put to sleep for eternity. Unfortunately the tax payers had to pay hundreds of thousands to keep this jac as a live for the past almost 37 years.
David Meeks says
You want crime to go down the the USA? Execute the day after sentence.
Pierre Tristam says
Sure. Why wait for appeals, due process and all that crap? Why even a day after the sentence? The bailiffs should shoot the guy right there, in court (or maybe the jury’s foreperson could do it), then bill the bullet to the guy’s family, right? What nerve to suffer justice.
FedUp says
You have the mindset of a typical liberal, Pierre.
Skibum says
Thankfully, Pierre Tristan has the intellect of a sane liberal instead of a maga infected douchebag!
Brian says
So “appeals, due process, and all that crap” for 37 years? I wonder how many of the VICTIMS family are still alive to see justice…..
Pierre Tristam says
Let’s not confuse revenge with justice. Justice was done 37 years ago when Heath was imprisoned. Killing him changed nothing, except for those who get off on barbarity.
TR says
No there was no Justice. The family lost a loved one and this jac as still lived for another 37 years on everyone else’s tax dollar. Death row inmates sit on death row way to long. If someone is sentenced to death and sits on death row, they should be allowed 1 appeal within the year of sentencing. They lose the appeal they get put to sleep the next day. But you would rather have the family of the victim live with the horror of the killer that took their family member still live for almost 40 years on tax payers dime. That’s ridicules.
Skibum says
Or… you could simply renounce your U.S. citizenship and move to N. Korea where they have immediate “justice” after their regime finds someone guilty. Even Kim Jong Un’s relatives have been executed for various offenses against that murderous dictator. His uncle was stood up in front of a cannon and blown to bits! You want instantaneous justice… bon voyage – just self deport and tout all of the wonderful benefits of trying to exist in one of those countries where there are NO appeals, NO realistic defense to arrest, let alone absolute chance of conviction.
You don’t like American humanity, constitutional protections and judicial norms for other people, but if it were YOU who were targeted for arrest and prosecution under a mistaken assumption that you committed a crime, YOU would demand every single constitutional right and protection you could conjure up, right?
Brian says
Services provided to death-row inmates in Florida cost $68.64 daily, roughly $25,000 a year. At 37 years, that is $925,000 to keep this scum alive. Therein lies the “barbarity”.
Pierre Tristam says
By that logic we should kill all inmates. Imagine the billions that would save. But then you’d be crying about guards’ lost jobs or the skyrocketing cost of pentobarbital.
TR says
No just the ones that have been on death row for more than a year or after they had their first appeal.
Dusty says
Way to go Ron only 36 years late keep them going.
JimboXYZ says
Seems both Ron & Ken Heath attempted to kill Sheridan with a blunt hunting knife & failed. They then proceeded to shoot the victim with a gun. to murder Sheridan. Doesn’t sound like a humane way to leave this earthly life as a murder to me ? Lethal injection was far better for more humane than this one deserved 36 years later ? I think 36 years was mercy enough. I must’ve missed it, but what exactly was the stay of execution or even the basis for a commuted sentence to life imprisonment for reason(s) ?
Land of no turn signals says says
Hmmmmm Pierre,you might be on to something.
Ray W says
In 1997, after my second stint as a prosecutor, I accepted the defense of the first three of many first-degree murder cases. Prosecutors in each of those three cases filed notices of intent to seek death.
In one, after the governor assigned to Miami what had turned into a prosecutorial conflict case, the new prosecutor called me. She asked why was this a death penalty case? When she appeared in court in Volusia County for the first time, she announced her withdrawal of the State’s notice of intent to seek death. My client eventually was sentenced to 20 years in prison, as I recall. After release, he found work in a restaurant. Riding a bicycle home after clocking out, he was killed by a motorist who fled the scene and, to my knowledge, never was caught.
In the second, a conflict of my own arose and I was ordered to withdraw. He was later convicted as charged, but sentenced to life.
The third received a 46-minute life recommendation from the jurors; he is still serving his life sentence.
When a senior prosecutor, I was notified of an opening in the homicide unit; I did not apply. I knew long before then that only a very few among us possess the experience and wisdom and character necessary to exercise the power to decide who should live or die, and that even fewer of those very few people ever became prosecutors. I knew the prosecutors in that unit. Some of them should never have been given the authority to decide who should live or die.
I knew that my father had been the first southern prosecutor since Reconstruction to persuade an all-white jury to sentence to death a white man, Mr. Cirack, for the murder of a black man.
I knew that the USSC in 1972 had abolished the death sentences of some 630 persons, including Mr. Cirack’s, and imposed a moratorium on pending death penalty prosecutions, not because the death penalty was per se unconstitutional, but because so many prosecutors of the day could not bring themselves to follow their oaths to uphold the Constitution.
In essence, the Court ruled that whenever the death penalty is sought in an arbitrary manner and then capriciously applied, the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution are violated.
When states rewrote their death penalty statutes to place more limits on prosecutors, the USSC allowed death penalty prosecutions to resume.
Since 1973, as many as 202 death row inhabitants all over the country have been exonerated and released from their sentences. Florida leads the nation in the number of such botched prosecutions, at 30. Based on a statistical study of the past 53 years, at least 4.1% of death row inmates right now are actually innocent, because over the past 53 years, 4.1% of all of those sentenced to die have been exonerated.
As Justice Marshall wrote in Furman:
Americans “know almost nothing about capital punishment.” If Americans ever did know about capital punishment, they would not, he added, “knowingly support purposeless vengeance.”
Justice Marshall, later in his opinion, wrote:
“No matter how careful courts are, the possibility of perjured testimony, mistaken honest testimony and human error remain too real. We have no way of judging how many innocent persons have been executed, but we can be certain that there were some.”
Judge Marshall is correct. People like TR and David Meeks and Brian don’t know shit about the many flaws inhering in capital punishment. They only understand “purposeless vengeance.”
23 states have abolished the death penalty. Two of the 27 states that still have the death penalty have not executed anyone in over 10 years. Six of those 27 states have imposed moratoriums on the death penalty. One of those six moratorium states had a Republican governor who, when he learned that since 1973 Ohio had exonerated 14 death row inmates and executed 13, imposed a moratorium on executions, saying that making that many mistakes was just too much.
Ignorance is not a virtue. Vengefulness is a huge character flaw. Prosecutors still cannot follow their oaths of office. The risk of executing the innocent is too great.