Florida Executes Billy Leon Kearse After 34 Years on Death Row | The Killing of Sgt. Danny Parrish

On March 3rd, 2026, Billy Leon Kearse was executed by lethal injection at Florida State Prison in Starke, Florida. He was 53 years old. He had spent 34 years on death row. The time of death was 6:24 in the evening.

On the night of January 18th, 1991, Sergeant Danny Thomas Parrish was shot 14 times on a street in Fort Pierce, Florida. He was 29 years old. He was on duty. He had made a routine traffic stop. He never went home.

The man who pulled that trigger was 18 years old, just 84 days past his birthday. He would be convicted. He would be sentenced to death. And then he would spend the next 34 years fighting that sentence through courtroom after courtroom, appeal after appeal, all the way to the United States Supreme Court.

But here is what makes this case impossible to look away from. It is not just a story about a crime. It is a story about what happens in the decades after, about a legal process that stretched across 34 years, about two families and a system put to the test at every level. So, where does a night like that begin? And what did the 34 years that followed look like?

It was the night of January 18th, 1991. Fort Pierce, Florida. A quiet stretch of road on what should have been an ordinary evening. Sergeant Danny Thomas Parrish, a 3-year veteran of the Fort Pierce Police Department, 29 years old, spotted a vehicle traveling the wrong way down a one-way street. He pulled the driver over. Standard procedure. Routine.

The driver was Billy Leon Kearse, 18 years old. He could not produce a valid driver’s license. Sergeant Parrish ordered him out of the vehicle. He attempted to place Kearse in handcuffs. That is when the situation broke down entirely. A struggle ensued. Kearse grabbed Parrish’s firearm. What followed was not a single shot. It was not a moment of panic that ended in one pull of a trigger.

Kearse fired that weapon 14 times. Nine rounds struck Parrish in the body. Four were stopped by his body armor. But the damage was fatal. A nearby taxi driver heard the shots, grabbed the officer’s radio, and called for help. Danny Thomas Parrish was rushed to the hospital. He did not survive. He left behind a family, a community in mourning, and a department that would not forget his name.

Billy Leon Kearse was arrested. The charge was first-degree murder. But to understand how an 18-year-old arrived at that moment on that road, you have to go back much further than January of 1991. Billy Leon Kearse was born on October 26th, 1972. His early years were, by virtually every account presented in court, marked by hardship from the very beginning.

His mother was a young teenager at the time of his birth. According to court records and testimony, she consumed alcohol throughout her pregnancy. The implications of that, developmentally, neurologically, would become a central argument for the defense decades later. Kearse grew up in conditions described in legal filings as severe poverty, instability, and repeated exposure to violence and neglect.

Those who knew him in those years described a young man who struggled with learning, with structure, with understanding consequences. That portrait would later become a central part of his legal defense, but none of that was part of the public conversation in 1991.

The trial came quickly, and what emerged inside that courtroom would set the course of the next 34 years until something from that past, something about how his mind worked, how it had always worked, resurfaced. Not at trial, but in appeal after appeal after appeal. By 1991, Billy Kearse was not employed in any formal capacity. He was 18. He had no documented career, no established path, no clear direction. What came into sharper focus years later was the argument that Kearse’s actions on the night of January 18th could not be fully understood without understanding the environment that had shaped him.

His legal team would eventually argue that fetal alcohol exposure, developmental delays, and an upbringing defined by poverty and instability had created a profile consistent with intellectual disability. Not an excuse, they were careful to say, but a mitigating factor the original jury had not been given the full picture on.

Because when Kearse was first tried, the jury was not given certain critical information about the aggravating circumstances being weighed against him. The Florida Supreme Court would later agree that this was an error, and that finding, years after the original verdict, became the legal cornerstone of everything that followed. A new sentencing phase was ordered. Testimony was heard again, and in 1997, 6 years after the first verdict, a jury once again returned the same answer: death.

That decision and the arguments that surrounded it, would become central to the defense’s strategy for decades to come. The question of why Billy Kearse did what he did on that January night in 1991 was never fully resolved to everyone’s satisfaction. His defense attorneys, particularly in his later appeals, commissioned IQ testing and extensive evaluations of his adaptive functioning. Their conclusion: Kearse fell within the range that would legally qualify as intellectually disabled, a status that, under a landmark 2002 Supreme Court ruling, would make his execution unconstitutional.

The argument was not that he didn’t commit the crime. It was that executing someone with an intellectual disability violates the 8th Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment, because such individuals, the court had reasoned, have diminished culpability. The prosecution and the state of Florida saw it differently. Their position was that the evaluations were insufficient, the thresholds not clearly met, and that the courts had reviewed these claims repeatedly, and had found them lacking.

For decades, that argument played out in courtroom after courtroom. State courts, federal courts, the 11th Circuit, and ultimately, the United States Supreme Court. Each time, the answer came back the same. When the death warrant was finally signed by Governor Ron DeSantis on January 29th, 2026, Kearse’s legal team had 33 days to mount his final defense. 33 days to litigate claims that had been building for decades. 33 days to make one last argument before the highest courts in the land.

And when the warrant was issued in those first critical hours, Kearse’s lead attorney, the man who had represented him for nearly 20 years, was not in a courtroom. He was at a hospital meeting with his father’s care team to discuss moving to hospice. His father died during the proceedings. The defense continued anyway. Appeals were filed. Arguments were made. Courts reviewed them. And one by one, each was denied. Hours before the scheduled execution, the final petition reached the United States Supreme Court. The court rejected it without comment. And with that, there were no more appeals left to file.

Billy Leon Kearse spent 34 years on Florida’s death row. He did not waive his appeals. He pursued every legal avenue available to him through state and federal courts, through constitutional arguments, and through filings that stretched across three decades of American legal history. By the time the death warrant was signed in January 2026, Kearse was 53 years old. He had lived more of his life on death row than he had lived outside of it.

On the morning of March 3rd, 2026, Billy Leon Kearse woke up at Florida State Prison near Starke, Florida, knowing it would be his last day. He had one visitor that morning, a spiritual advisor. Corrections officials asked about his condition, said he was calm. They described him as being in good spirits. He declined his last meal. In the hours before the execution was scheduled to begin, word came through that Kearse had sent a message to his friends and family. He asked them to carry forward not anger, but love, even toward those who supported his execution. It was, by accounts from those who received it, a message of deliberate peace.

The witness chamber filled. Parrish family members were present. Corrections officials took their positions. Outside the prison gates, a small group of people had gathered. They stood quietly. When the time came, a bell tolled. At approximately 6:00 p.m., Billy Leon Kearse was brought into the execution chamber. He was asked if he had final words. He did. Looking toward the witnesses gathered in the chamber, Kearse addressed the family of Danny Thomas Parrish directly:

“To his family, I sincerely apologize for what I have done. And in turn, I pray my father would give me the strength to ask for their forgiveness, to give you peace and resolve.”

He acknowledged that his death would not undo the death of Sergeant Parrish. He asked for forgiveness anyway. The three-drug lethal injection was then administered. Kearse twitched briefly after the drugs began. He stopped moving within minutes. A medic entered the room approximately 15 minutes later. At 6:24 p.m. on March 3rd, 2026, Billy Leon Kearse was pronounced dead. It was Florida’s 22nd execution in just over a year, a pace that shattered state records.

The execution of Billy Leon Kearse did not close the conversation. It reopened it. Those who believed justice had been served pointed to Danny Parrish, a young sergeant 3 years on the force who made a routine traffic stop and never went home. “34 years is a long time to wait,” they said. But the process had run its course, and the sentence had been carried out. Those who opposed the execution pointed to the 33-day window between the death warrant and the execution, the intellectual disability claims, and the compressed timeline that defense attorneys argued left insufficient time to properly litigate final appeals. Both positions found an audience. Neither silenced the other.

Danny Thomas Parrish was 29 years old when he was killed. He had 3 years on the force. He made a routine traffic stop. He did not make it home. Billy Leon Kearse was 18 years old when he pulled that trigger. He was 53 when the state of Florida carried out his sentence.

In between, there were 34 years of courts, appeals, and legal proceedings that touched on some of the most debated questions in American criminal justice. What does justice look like for a crime this serious? What does the law owe a victim? What does it owe a defendant? How does a legal process that spans three decades serve the people it is meant to serve? On both sides.

This case did not answer those questions. It simply put them in front of us one more time. Billy Leon Kearse was executed at 6:24 in the evening on March 3rd, 2026. Danny Thomas Parrish has been gone since January 18th, 1991. Those are the facts. What they mean is something each person will have to decide for themselves.