Florida executed James Robertson on Tuesday, nearly 18 years after he strangled his sleeping cellmate with tied-together socks and told investigators he did it so he’d be sent to death row. He got what he asked for. He was pronounced dead just after 12:30 p.m. at Florida State Prison, the state’s 17th execution this year.
Asked for his last words, Robertson, 63, said: “Naw, I’m straight,” the Charlotte Sun reported. He smiled at the witnesses a few times before the drugs took effect.
Why did James Robertson kill his cellmate?
Robertson went to prison at 17 in 1980 for burglary and assault, and kept adding years with convictions for escape, battery and weapons behind bars, the AP reported. By 2008 he was held in close management, one of Florida’s most restrictive levels of custody, which he later described as “torture.” On Dec. 10, 2008, at Charlotte Correctional Institution near Punta Gorda, he waited for officers to finish their rounds, then strangled his cellmate, Frank Hart, as he slept. He told investigators the attack was unprovoked and that he did it so he’d be sentenced to death instead of living out his days in prison.
He pleaded guilty, waived a jury and every appeal, and was sentenced to death in 2012. In between, he stabbed a prison guard in 2011, another attempt to get a death sentence, according to the Sun. Hart had been serving time since 2003 for sexual battery.
What did Frank Hart’s daughter say?
Rebecca Hart spoke after the execution. “To most people, he may be a name in a court record, a victim in a criminal case, or a part of a story they’ve watched on television,” she said. “But to me, he was my dad.” She said her father was supposed to be released on Dec. 18. “I could have had my dad back.”
Hart noted that Robertson was featured on Netflix’s “I Am a Killer,” which she said made her father’s death “an episode they can watch and turn off. For my family, there is no remote control.” She ended: “His name is Frank Richard Hart. He was my dad. His life mattered before this was a murder and it still matters now,” WWSB reported.
Why is Florida executing so many people?
Gov. Ron DeSantis oversaw 19 executions in 2025, the most in a single year for any Florida governor since 1976, and Florida has carried out more than half of the roughly 30 U.S. executions so far this year. Two more are scheduled: William Reaves on Oct. 20 and Jesse Guardado on Nov. 5. DeSantis did withdraw one death warrant last week, for 74-year-old William Thompson, whose lawyers say he has dementia.
Death penalty opponents say Robertson’s case cuts against the idea that executions deter murder. “When someone commits murder to try to secure his own execution, we have to confront the conditions that contributed to that decision and the reality that the existence of the death penalty may have caused the very violence it purportedly prevents,” said Maria DeLiberato of Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty.
The BeezLoop Take
Whatever you think of the death penalty, this case is hard to defend as justice. A man said plainly that he killed to get the state to kill him, and the state did exactly that. The death penalty didn’t stop this murder. It was the motive.
Frank Hart was in the state’s custody, due to go home that month by his daughter’s account, and he was locked in a cell with a man who had piled up convictions for violence behind bars. His daughter is right that he got lost in the story. Florida owed him protection before it owed anyone an execution.
The open question: what is Florida doing about the solitary conditions that a man said were worse than dying?
Also on BeezLoop: Tennessee gave Christa Pike two doses of pentobarbital and she survived.
Sources: Charlotte Sun · WWSB/ABC7 Sarasota · Associated Press via CBS Miami · Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty · 10 Tampa Bay (video)
