At about half past two on the afternoon of November 17, 1986, lawyers for Theodore Robert Bundy filed a 183-page petition in the federal court in Orlando. Florida intended to put him to death the next morning. Before the day was out, a district judge had dismissed the petition as abusive, and nothing stood between Bundy and the electric chair at Starke except the federal appeals court in Atlanta. Hours before the appointed time, that court granted a stay. Bundy lived another twenty-six months.
A stay of execution decides nothing about guilt and usually very little about the merits. It is a court’s statement that a question cannot be answered properly in the time the death warrant allows. Warrants in most states carry fixed dates, sometimes a window of a few days, and when the window closes the state must begin again. That arithmetic shapes the end of almost every capital case. Lawyers file late because new facts surface late, because a prisoner changes his mind, or because the law shifts beneath them. Prosecutors answer that the filing is a tactic. Judges, often working through the night, must choose.
The ten cases that follow run from the late 1970s to 2024 and cross eight jurisdictions, one of them the United States Army. Each involves a person convicted of, or who confessed to, more than one killing. In several, a stay came within hours of the execution. In one, it came after the prisoner had already been taken into the execution chamber. None of the stays undid a conviction.
Bundy had been convicted in Utah in March 1976. In Florida, a Miami jury convicted him on July 24, 1979, of two counts of first-degree murder, and an Orlando jury convicted him in 1980 of the kidnapping and first-degree murder of Kimberly Leach. Both trials ended in death sentences. The Florida Supreme Court affirmed the first case on June 21, 1984, and the second on May 9, 1985, using the Leach appeal to bar hypnotically refreshed testimony in future Florida trials while holding the error harmless in his own.
The United States Supreme Court declined to hear the direct appeal on October 14, 1986. A week later the governor signed a warrant for November 18. When the federal appeals court stayed that date, it did more than buy time. It later ordered a hearing on a question no court had squarely faced: whether Bundy had been competent to stand trial in Orlando in 1980.
The hearing took place before U.S. District Judge G. Kendall Sharp in October and December 1987. Dorothy Lewis, a psychiatrist from New York University, testified that he suffered from a bipolar mood disorder and had been unable to assist his lawyers. The court preferred two other psychiatrists, and Judge Sharp ruled that Bundy "was at all times competent to stand trial." In 1988 the Eleventh Circuit affirmed in Bundy v. Dugger, rejecting every claim in the petition.
Governor Bob Martinez signed the last warrant on January 17, 1989. In the final week Bundy confessed to detectives from several Western states, and his lawyer later said he saw what he knew as something to trade for time. The governor declined to wait. The courts rejected a final claim of incompetence, and the United States Supreme Court refused a last stay by five votes to four. Bundy was executed in the electric chair at Florida State Prison on January 24, 1989, and pronounced dead at 7:16 a.m. He was forty-two.
The North Carolina case of Velma Barfield shows the instrument from both sides. She was convicted in Bladen County in 1978 of the first-degree murder of Stewart Taylor, a St. Pauls farmer and her fiance, and sentenced to death on December 2 of that year. She confessed to three other deaths, including her mother’s, and was never tried for them.
Her first years on death row were punctuated by stays. The North Carolina Supreme Court stayed the execution while it heard her automatic appeal and affirmed on November 6, 1979. An execution date was then set for October 17, 1980; on October 3 her new lawyers, James D. Little and Richard H. Burr III, filed a motion for appropriate relief raising thirteen grounds, and the date was stayed. When that motion failed, they went to the federal court for the Eastern District of North Carolina in March 1982, and Chief Judge Franklin T. Dupree Jr. stayed the execution again while he heard argument. He denied the petition in May 1982, and the Fourth Circuit affirmed in 1983.
Governor Jim Hunt denied clemency on September 27, 1984, in the closing weeks of his campaign against Senator Jesse Helms. The execution was set for 2 a.m. on November 2. At first Barfield declined to fight. Then her advocates learned that her competency to stand trial in 1978, when she may have been in withdrawal from prescription drugs, had never been tested in court. She decided to go ahead, and her lawyers filed a second motion on October 29.
Every court said no, and quickly. A Superior Court judge in Lumberton denied the motion on October 30 after a twenty-minute hearing. The North Carolina Supreme Court refused a stay that evening, two justices dissenting without opinion. On October 31 Judge Dupree, who had stayed her execution two years earlier, denied a stay but granted a certificate allowing an appeal. The Fourth Circuit heard argument in Richmond at 8:30 a.m. on November 1 and rejected it in Barfield v. Woodard. The competency evidence, the panel wrote, offered only "a basis for bald conjecture," and it added: "This case has not been characterized by any rush to execution." Joseph Ingle, who visited her regularly on death row, wrote that the order arrived shortly after 5 p.m., about nine hours before the execution.
She did not ask the United States Supreme Court to intervene. United Press International counted twelve courts that had heard her case over six years. She was executed by lethal injection at Central Prison in Raleigh early on November 2, 1984, the first woman put to death in the United States since 1962 and the first by lethal injection.
Jeffrey Daugherty, a twenty-year-old from Michigan, was arrested in Dillwyn, Virginia, on March 12, 1976, after a run of robberies and killings in Florida and Pennsylvania. A Pennsylvania jury convicted him of the first-degree murder of Elizabeth Shank in December 1976. In Florida in 1980 he pleaded guilty to the murders of Carmen Abrams and Betty Campbell, receiving life terms, and in Brevard County to the first-degree murder, robbery and kidnapping of Lavonne Patricia Sailer, a hitchhiker in Melbourne who was robbed of $15. A Brevard judge sentenced him to death on April 27, 1981.
The first death warrant, signed August 24, 1987, set the execution for 7 a.m. on October 15. The Florida Supreme Court denied a stay on September 21. Daugherty filed a federal habeas petition on October 9, and the district court denied it the next day, holding that he had not made a colorable showing that his constitutional rights had been violated.
On October 13, two days before the date, a panel of the Eleventh Circuit granted a certificate of probable cause and an indefinite stay. Chief Judge Roney and Judge Hatchett wrote that the petition raised issues debatable among reasonable jurists and that there was not enough time to decide them before the warrant expired. Judge Hill dissented, writing that the severity of the penalty did not by itself justify a certificate.
The reprieve lasted a year. The Eleventh Circuit decided the appeal against him on February 12, 1988, the Supreme Court declined review that October, and Governor Bob Martinez signed a second warrant on October 7 for 7 a.m. on November 4. A Brevard County judge denied a new post-conviction motion on October 27, and the Florida Supreme Court, all seven justices concurring, affirmed and refused a stay on November 1. On November 7, 1988, the United States Supreme Court denied his last applications for a stay. Justice Brennan dissented, joined by Justice Marshall and in part by Justice Blackmun, who would have held the case for a pending decision on similar jury instructions. Justice Stevens said he too would have granted the stay.
Most last-minute stays are sought by the condemned. In Connecticut in 2005 the stays were sought by others, over the objection of the man they were meant to protect.
Michael Bruce Ross, a 1981 Cornell graduate who sold insurance in eastern Connecticut, was convicted in 1987 of six counts of capital felony covering the deaths of four girls and young women in New London County. He had pleaded guilty in 1985 to two murders in Windham County, and in 2001 he was sentenced in New York for another death. The Connecticut Supreme Court reversed his death sentences in 1994; a new jury imposed death again in 2000, and the sentence was affirmed on June 1, 2004.
That September, Ross dismissed the public defenders who had represented him for seventeen years and told the trial court he wanted no more appeals. Judge Patrick J. Clifford set the execution for January 26, 2005. The public defender’s office, led by Gerard A. Smyth, refused to accept the waiver and went to federal court as his "next friend." On January 24, U.S. District Judge Robert N. Chatigny granted the office standing, ordered a full hearing on Ross’s competency and stayed the execution. A psychiatrist who studied the effects of long solitary confinement had testified that Ross understood his position but could not make a rational choice to give up his appeals.
The Second Circuit refused to lift the stay on January 25. The United States Supreme Court vacated it on January 27, and the execution was reset. The next day Judge Chatigny held a conference call in which he sharply criticized the efforts of Ross’s own lawyer to speed the execution and questioned the state’s competency evaluation. The lawyer then asked for time to examine a possible conflict of interest, and the state agreed. On January 31 the Connecticut Supreme Court stayed the execution until the warrant expired at midnight. A psychiatrist writing later in the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law reported that it was halted about seventy-five minutes before it was due.
The delay produced the hearing the federal judge had wanted. It ran six days in April, with four psychiatrists, Ross himself and his father on the stand. On April 22, 2005, Judge Clifford ruled Ross competent, calling his decision "the product of a rational intellect and an unconstrained will," and the Connecticut Supreme Court affirmed on May 9. Last suits by his father and his sister failed. Ross was executed by lethal injection at Osborn Correctional Institution in Somers and pronounced dead at 2:25 a.m. on May 13, 2005, the first person executed in New England since 1960.
Paul Dennis Reid Jr came to Nashville from Texas hoping to sing country music. In the spring of 1997 he robbed three restaurants in Nashville and Clarksville and killed seven workers. Three juries convicted him of seven counts of first-degree murder and returned seven death sentences.
The first execution date was April 29, 2003. That month Reid wrote a ninety-two-page letter to state officials renouncing his post-conviction appeals. His lawyers asked the Tennessee Supreme Court for a year’s stay to examine his competence; on April 22 the court refused. His sister then filed a "next friend" petition in federal court. The district court dismissed it, but the federal appeals court stayed the execution and sent the case back for a competency hearing. On April 28, hours before the scheduled time, Reid himself filed a post-conviction petition in Davidson County without a lawyer. The trial court stayed the execution and appointed the state’s Office of the Post-Conviction Defender. Reid later wrote that he had "errored" in signing it.
The pattern repeated in 2006. With an execution set for June 28, another sister filed next-friend petitions in state and federal court. On June 27 a federal judge blocked the execution to decide whether Reid was competent to abandon his appeals, Amnesty International reported, and the state’s request to lift the stay was refused the next day. That August the state withdrew its objection to the sister’s petition after its own expert concluded that Reid could not then make a rational decision to give up review.
A decade of competency litigation came next. Reid described a government agency he called "Scientific Technology" that had monitored him since 1985 and staged his trials with actors. Experts split over whether the beliefs were genuine, invented or both. On January 24, 2013, a unanimous Tennessee Supreme Court held that his advocates had not proved by clear and convincing evidence that he lacked the capacity to give up post-conviction relief, and set the test that Tennessee courts now apply: whether a prisoner can make rational decisions about managing his appeals. Reid never faced another date. He died at Nashville General Hospital on November 1, 2013, aged fifty-five. None of his seven death sentences was carried out.
The military death penalty requires a step no state imposes: under Article 71 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, a death sentence cannot be carried out until the President approves it. Ronald Adrin Gray, an Army cook with the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, pleaded guilty in North Carolina state court in 1987 to two counts of second-degree murder. A general court-martial at Fort Bragg then convicted him of the premeditated murders of Kimberly Ann Ruggles and Private Laura Lee Vickery-Clay and the attempted premeditated murder of a woman soldier, with other charges, and on April 12, 1988, sentenced him to death.
His military appeals ended in 2001. On July 28, 2008, President George W. Bush approved the sentence, the first such approval since Dwight Eisenhower in 1957. In November the Army announced that the Secretary of the Army, Pete Geren, had set the execution for December 10, 2008, at the federal prison complex in Terre Haute, Indiana. It would have been the first American military execution since 1961.
Gray’s lawyers went to the U.S. District Court for the District of Kansas, which has jurisdiction over Fort Leavenworth. On November 26, 2008, two weeks before the date, Judge Richard Rogers stayed the execution so that Gray could file a petition for habeas corpus. Government lawyers argued that Gray had had years to appeal. His lawyer answered that the sentence had not been final until the President acted, and that this was his first federal habeas review.
The stay held for eight years. The petition, filed in April 2009, moved between the federal court in Kansas, the Tenth Circuit and the military courts. In October 2016 Judge J. Thomas Marten dismissed it without prejudice so that Gray could return to the military courts. When the government gave notice of a new execution date, Gray argued that the 2008 stay was still in force. On December 20, 2016, the judge ruled that it was not, and declined to grant another, because no petition was pending before him. Federal prosecutors had argued that Gray seemed to believe "he is entitled to an indefinite federal stay of execution," adding, "This is not the law."
No date was set. The military courts rejected his third petition, the Supreme Court denied review in June 2018, and the case returned to Kansas. As of January 2023, a new habeas petition there had been stayed since March 2022 while the Tenth Circuit decided two other military cases. In June 2026, ABC News reported an Army plan to prepare for executions if a president ordered them, and noted that Gray was the only prisoner on military death row whose execution a president had approved. He remained at the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth with no execution date reported.
Carlton Gary was convicted in 1986 of three counts of malice murder, with other charges, in the deaths of Florence Scheible, Martha Thurmond and Kathleen Woodruff, older women in Columbus, Georgia, in late 1977. He denied the killings for more than thirty years. His appeals ran through state and federal courts until the United States Supreme Court declined review on November 30, 2009.
Georgia set his execution for December 16, 2009. On December 7 his lawyer, Jack Martin, asked the trial court for DNA testing under a 2003 state law allowing it where the science had not been available at trial. Superior Court Judge Robert Johnston refused, calling the motion a delaying tactic, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported. The Board of Pardons and Paroles denied clemency on December 15.
On December 16, about four hours before the execution time, the Supreme Court of Georgia voted 5 to 2 to stay it and sent the case back for a hearing on testing. Chief Justice Carol Hunstein and Justice George Carley dissented. Executing Gary without the test "would have been a sin," Martin told the paper.
The stay opened eight more years of litigation, and the science cut both ways. Under a 2010 consent order, the parties tested slides from the original crime laboratory work. The state reported that a sample from the death of Jean Dimenstein, a killing Gary was never charged with, matched his profile, and his own expert accepted the match. A slide from the Thurmond case at first produced a profile that did not match him; the laboratory then traced it to a quality-control sample handled by another scientist, and the slide could not be retested. Gary’s lawyers said the state had destroyed the one sample that might have cleared him. The trial court ruled the contamination was not done in bad faith.
Gary filed an extraordinary motion for a new trial in 2012. Judge Frank J. Jordan Jr. of the Muscogee County Superior Court denied it on September 1, 2017, holding that the new evidence would probably not have produced a different verdict. A new execution window opened on March 15, 2018. That afternoon, at about 5:30, the Supreme Court of Georgia refused to halt it. The Eleventh Circuit refused permission for a second federal petition, and the United States Supreme Court denied a stay without comment. The execution, set for 7 p.m., was carried out at 10:33 p.m. at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison in Jackson.
Marshall Lee Gore was convicted of the first-degree murders of two women he met within six weeks of each other in early 1988: Susan Roark, in a Columbia County trial in 1990, and Robyn Novick, in a Dade County retrial in 1999. Governor Rick Scott signed his death warrant on May 13, 2013, for June 24, in the Novick case.
The warrant produced three stays in two months. On May 18 Gore’s state lawyer wrote to the governor that he believed his client was insane to be executed. Florida law then required the governor to stay the execution and appoint three psychiatrists. They examined Gore on May 28 and concluded unanimously that he was feigning his symptoms, including claims of a state conspiracy to harvest prisoners' organs. On May 30 the governor ruled him competent and lifted the stay.
On the evening of June 21 a federal lawyer for Gore filed a habeas petition, conceding the claim had not been raised in state court. The district court dismissed it. On June 24, the scheduled day, the Eleventh Circuit granted a temporary stay; the Associated Press reported that it came less than two hours before the execution was to begin. Three days later a panel of Judges Tjoflat, Carnes and Hull affirmed the dismissal and lifted the stay, holding that the rule Gore relied on did not reach a claim of incompetence to be executed.
The governor reset the execution for July 10. A circuit judge in Bradford County stayed it again and held a hearing on July 15 and 16. The judge ruled that Gore was feigning delusions and that there was "no credible evidence" he believed he would be executed for anything other than the murder of Robyn Novick. The Florida Supreme Court unanimously affirmed on August 13.
The fourth delay was not judicial at all. The governor set the execution for September 10, then moved it to October 1 at the request of Attorney General Pam Bondi’s office; her re-election campaign had scheduled its kickoff for September 10, WFSU reported. On September 9 Bondi said in a statement that her office should not have asked. On October 1 the United States Supreme Court denied a stay, and Gore was executed by lethal injection at Florida State Prison that evening, pronounced dead at 6:12 p.m. He had spent twenty-three years on death row.
The rarest kind of last-minute reprieve is the one the state requests. Anthony Allen Shore, a Houston tow truck driver and telephone repairman, was convicted in 2004 of the capital murder of Maria del Carmen Estrada, twenty-one, after DNA taken from him following an unrelated 1998 plea matched evidence in her 1992 case. He confessed to her killing and to three other killings between 1986 and 1995, none of them charged. At trial his lawyers told the jury that, against their advice, he wanted a death sentence. He received it.
His execution was set for October 18, 2017. In July, during an inquiry into his mental health, prison staff had taken from his cell a folder of material about the 1998 killing of Melissa Trotter, a case for which another death row prisoner, Larry Ray Swearingen, was scheduled to die four weeks after Shore. A visitor told an investigator that Shore had said he killed Trotter and would not let Swearingen be executed for it. The Montgomery County District Attorney, Brett Ligon, said he remained certain of Swearingen’s guilt but that a posthumous claim by Shore would leave a cloud over the case. He asked the Harris County District Attorney, Kim Ogg, to move the date.
On October 18, hours before the execution, Ogg obtained a court order withdrawing the death warrant. The new date, January 18, 2018, was the earliest the law allowed. "It is always the first responsibility of prosecutors to see that justice is done," Ogg said, adding that Shore’s execution was "inevitable." A prison spokesman quoted Shore’s reaction: God had given him another ninety days.
The ninety days settled the question the delay was meant to settle. Ligon told The Texas Tribune that investigators, including the Texas Rangers, had concluded Shore was not responsible for Trotter’s death or for any other open murder case. Shore’s lawyers filed no last challenges in January. He was executed at Huntsville on January 18, 2018, and pronounced dead at 6:28 p.m., the first execution in the United States that year. Swearingen was executed on August 21, 2019.
Thomas Eugene Creech has been convicted of five murders in Idaho, Oregon and California. His death sentence rests on the 1981 murder of David Dale Jensen, a fellow prisoner, to which he pleaded guilty in Ada County. Sentenced to death in 1982, resentenced in 1995, he became the longest-serving prisoner on Idaho’s death row.
An October 2023 warrant set his execution for November 8, and the court stayed it on October 19 after the Idaho Commission of Pardons and Parole agreed to hear his request for commutation. On January 29, 2024, the six participating commissioners split 3 to 3. A tie meant no recommendation, and without one the governor could not commute. A new warrant set February 28. On February 24 the Ninth Circuit rejected his challenge to the clemency hearing, Courthouse News Service reported.
On the morning of February 28, 2024, the execution was attempted at the Idaho Maximum Security Institution near Kuna and called off before any lethal drug was given. Creech was returned to his cell, and the warrant expired at the end of the day.
The litigation that followed asked whether a state may try again. A state district court dismissed his petition in September 2024. On October 16 the Ninth Circuit ruled that the federal judge in his clemency suit should have stepped aside, and the same day the state served a new warrant for November 13. On November 5 the Idaho Supreme Court, relying on the 1947 decision in Louisiana ex rel. Francis v. Resweber, held that a second attempt would not, on these facts, be cruel and unusual punishment. That same day Senior U.S. District Judge G. Murray Snow of Arizona, sitting because Idaho’s federal judges had potential conflicts, said he would stay the execution while he considered the same claims, and the November warrant lapsed.
Idaho changed the method rather than the sentence. On March 12, 2025, Governor Brad Little signed a bill making the firing squad the state’s primary method from July 1, 2026. In July 2026 Creech and Gerald Pizzuto, described as the next two prisoners in line, sued the director of the Department of Correction over the new procedures. As of October 1, 2026, Creech, then in his mid-seventies, remained on Idaho’s death row with no execution date reported.
Set side by side, the cases show how narrow the instrument is. Bundy’s stay produced a competency hearing he lost. Carlton Gary’s produced DNA results that gave each side something and changed no verdict. Shore’s produced an investigation that cleared nothing except the question of whether his late account could be believed. In Connecticut and Tennessee, the stays served people who doubted the condemned man’s capacity to choose death, and the courts eventually ruled that both men could make that choice. In Florida, Gore’s lawyers won three delays on a claim of insanity that every judge who heard it rejected.
What a stay buys is time, and the time is measured by the people waiting on either side of it: the relatives who travel to a prison and leave without an answer, the prisoner who is told at the eleventh hour that the date has moved. Velma Barfield’s lawyers were refused by four courts in three days and she was dead within hours. Ronald Gray’s lawyers won a stay in 2008 that kept a presidential order from being carried out for eight years, and his sentence has still not been executed. The difference between those outcomes was rarely the strength of the evidence of guilt. It was the question in front of the court on the last night, and whether the judges believed it could be answered before morning.
• March 1, 1976: Bundy convicted in Utah.
• July 24, 1979: Bundy convicted in Miami of two counts of first-degree murder.
• November 6, 1979: North Carolina Supreme Court affirms Barfield’s conviction after staying her execution during the appeal.
• October 3, 1980: Barfield’s lawyers file for state post-conviction relief; her October 17 execution date is stayed.
• March 1982: Judge Dupree stays Barfield’s execution in federal court.
• October 30 to November 1, 1984: state and federal courts refuse Barfield’s last stay requests.
• November 2, 1984: Barfield executed in Raleigh.
• November 17, 1986: Eleventh Circuit stays Bundy’s November 18 execution.
• October 13, 1987: Eleventh Circuit stays Daugherty’s October 15 execution.
• November 7, 1988: U.S. Supreme Court denies Daugherty’s last stay applications.
• January 24, 1989: Bundy executed at Florida State Prison.
• April 28, 2003: Reid files his own petition hours before his April 29 date; the trial court stays the execution.
• January 24, 2005: Judge Chatigny stays Ross’s execution; the Supreme Court vacates the stay January 27.
• January 31, 2005: Connecticut Supreme Court stays Ross’s execution until the warrant expires.
• May 13, 2005: Ross executed at Somers, Connecticut.
• June 27, 2006: a federal judge stays Reid’s June 28 execution.
• July 28, 2008: President Bush approves Gray’s death sentence.
• November 26, 2008: Judge Rogers stays Gray’s December 10 execution.
• December 16, 2009: Supreme Court of Georgia stays Gary’s execution about four hours before it was due.
• January 24, 2013: Tennessee Supreme Court rules against Reid’s advocates on competency.
• May 18, 2013: Florida’s governor stays Gore’s execution for a sanity review; lifted May 30.
• June 24, 2013: Eleventh Circuit grants Gore a temporary stay; lifted June 27.
• July 2013: Bradford County judge stays Gore’s July 10 execution.
• October 1, 2013: Gore executed.
• November 1, 2013: Reid dies on death row.
• December 20, 2016: Gray’s 2008 stay ruled no longer in force.
• October 18, 2017: Shore’s execution withdrawn hours before, at the district attorney’s request.
• January 18, 2018: Shore executed at Huntsville.
• March 15, 2018: Gary executed at Jackson, Georgia.
• January 29, 2024: Idaho commission splits 3 to 3 on Creech’s clemency.
• February 28, 2024: Creech’s execution halted; the warrant expires.
• November 5, 2024: Judge Snow says he will stay Creech’s November 13 execution.
• March 12, 2025: Idaho makes the firing squad its primary method, effective July 1, 2026.
• June 2026: Gray reported on military death row with no date.
• October 1, 2026: Creech reported on Idaho’s death row with no date.