\n<\/p>\n
Sandra never knew<\/span> what happened to the child she had at 17.<\/p>\n Growing up in a respected, church-going, middle-class family in the South, her parents were dismayed when she told them she was pregnant. This was the early 1960s. \u201cTo get pregnant out of wedlock and while you were still that young was a stigma,\u201d Sandra said. A baby also threatened her future ambitions: She was an outstanding student, a top basketball player, and lead clarinetist in her school band. Her parents were firm; the child should be given up for adoption. \u201cI wasn\u2019t going to fight it,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n The family kept the baby a secret, sending Sandra to New York City to give birth. She stayed at a home for unwed mothers and on January 3, 1963, delivered a boy at the municipal hospital in Queens. He weighed 7 pounds, 13 ounces, according to the birth records, an \u201calert\u201d and \u201cresponsive\u201d baby with \u201ccurly black hair, dark brown eyes, and a medium complexion.\u201d She named him Barry. Then he was gone.<\/p>\n For the next several years, Sandra didn\u2019t dwell on the child she gave up. \u201cOr maybe I purposely put it out of my mind so that I could move on,\u201d she said. She graduated high school, went to college and got married, choosing her career over raising children. At a time when few women were working on Wall Street, let alone Black women, she found success in international banking. \u201cI was good at it,\u201d she said. And it gave her a chance to travel the world.<\/p>\n Nevertheless, as she approached her 30th birthday in 1975, Sandra found herself yearning to know what had happened to her child. The adoption remained a closely guarded secret even within her own family. (She agreed to be interviewed on the condition that she would not be identified by her real name.) But she did tell her husband. \u201cAnd he asked me, would I like to find him?\u201d<\/p>\n Sandra called the group home and the hospital in Queens. But New York\u2019s stringent adoption record laws blocked her at every turn. It was not until decades later, in 2019, that the state would amend its adoption regulations, giving adoptees a right to obtain a copy of their birth certificate upon turning 18. By then, Sandra had long left the city and moved back south.<\/p>\n On October 26, 2022, she heard a knock at her front door. As she recalls, she was in the process of booking a vacation \u2014 her first big trip since losing her husband of 45 years. \u201cI had just started to get myself together,\u201d she said. But her world was about to turn upside down again.<\/p>\n The visitor was an investigator from Florida\u2019s Capital Collateral Regional Counsel \u2013 South, a legal office based in Ft. Lauderdale. She carried a copy of her son\u2019s birth certificate, along with a handful of other records. She told Sandra that her son wished to be in touch with her. Was she open to that?<\/p>\n Elated, Sandra said yes. It was only when they sat down at her breakfast nook that the woman told her that her son was in prison. His name was Richard Barry Randolph, and he was on Florida\u2019s death row.<\/p>\n Three years later, Sandra still struggles to find words to describe that moment. Her excitement turned to shock, then disbelief, then horror. Before leaving her house, the investigator warned that if Sandra planned to read news coverage of the crime, she should keep in mind that it did not reflect the whole story. Her son was no longer the same person he\u2019d been. Sandra went online soon afterward. \u201cThat\u2019s when I lost it,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n The news stories said that he raped and murdered a 62-year-old woman at a Florida convenience store in 1988. The more she read about his case, she confessed, \u201cI wasn\u2019t sure I wanted to know him.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve never had anyone in my family do anything like this. Never had anyone in my family incarcerated \u2014 definitely not on death row,\u201d she said. The violence of his crime made her want to disavow him. \u201cFor me to say, \u2018That\u2019s my child\u2019 was like, \u2018Oh no.\u2019 And that\u2019s just the way I felt at the time. I\u2019ve since changed my mind.\u201d<\/p>\n A few weeks later, Sandra got a letter from her son in the mail. It was handwritten and read like he had carefully planned what to say. He wanted her to know that he wasn\u2019t angry at her for giving him up \u2014 but he did want to know why. His childhood had been painful. Case records described his adoptive parents as ill-equipped to raise him; his mother drank heavily and his father was physically abusive. But he wanted to make clear that he didn\u2019t blame Sandra. \u201cHe said that he didn\u2019t hold it against me,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n \u201cThe idea of giving him up for adoption was so that he would get a better home,\u201d Sandra said. Instead, he\u2019d been traumatized. According to the lawyers, her son had developed a serious problem with crack cocaine, which helped pave the way to his crime. But the explanation felt inadequate. Plenty of people struggled with addiction without committing such violence, she thought. \u201cI don\u2019t know what caused him to do that,\u201d she said. Yet she found herself thinking, \u201cWhat can I do to help you?\u201d<\/p>\n In October 2025, a few days before her 80th birthday, Sandra answered a call from her son. By then, they had been talking for nearly three years. \u201cThey just signed the warrant,\u201d he said \u2014 and she knew from their previous conversations what this meant. Florida\u2019s governor had set an execution date. He was scheduled to die by lethal injection on November 20.<\/p>\n \u201c\u2018I want you to stay strong,\u2019\u201d Sandra recalled him saying. \u201cAnd then he apologized for it being my birthday week.\u201d<\/p>\n Today, Richard Randolph<\/span> is 63 years old and has been on death row for nearly 37 years. He converted to Islam decades ago and took the name Malik Abdul-Sajjad. Barring last-minute intervention, he will die by lethal injection on Thursday night at Florida State Prison in Raiford \u2014 the 17th person killed in the state\u2019s execution chamber this year.<\/p>\n Florida has led a resurgence of executions<\/a> across the country in 2025. Since May, it has averaged about two executions per month, far outpacing any state in the country. Although Florida has always been a leading death penalty state \u2014 it has the second largest death row in the U.S. \u2014 the current execution spree is unprecedented. \u201cWe had one last week and then this week and then there\u2019s another one in December,\u201d said capital defense attorney Maria DeLiberato, former executive director of Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty<\/a>, in a phone call on Monday. On Tuesday night, Florida announced yet another execution date for December. If all the executions go through, the state will end the year having killed 19 people \u2014 more than the previous 10 years combined.<\/p>\n The execution spree is the handiwork of Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has presided over a systemic dismantling<\/a> of the legal framework that once governed Florida\u2019s death penalty. He has transformed the state Supreme Court, handpicking judges willing to discard long-standing precedents, including critical guardrails to prevent wrongful executions. Meanwhile, DeSantis\u2019s position gives him more power than most to carry out death sentences. While other states require courts to schedule execution dates at the request of a state attorney general or local district attorney, in Florida the governor can do it himself. \u201cHe just picks somebody,\u201d DeLiberato says, \u201cand then 30 days later they\u2019re dead.\u201d<\/p>\n The executions have been driven by politics. DeSantis reactivated Florida\u2019s death chamber in 2023 \u2014 just a few months before announcing his run for president. It was part of a broader death penalty push triggered in part by the long-awaited conviction of Nikolas Cruz, who slaughtered 17 people at a high school in Parkland, Florida, in 2018. Prosecutors had refused to allow Cruz to plead guilty to avoid the death penalty, insisting on a costly, protracted capital trial, only for jurors to reject a death sentence, opting instead for life without parole.<\/p>\n Today, Florida only requires eight jurors to send a defendant to die.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n DeSantis seized on the backlash. Florida had only recently reformed its death penalty law to require juries to unanimously agree on a death sentence. For much of its history, a defendant could be sent to death row by a vote of just 7 to 5. But in 2016, the state Supreme Court declared the statute unconstitutional, and lawmakers reformed the law to bring Florida in line with other states, requiring all 12 jurors to agree. After learning that three jurors held out against a death sentence in Cruz\u2019s case, conservative lawmakers accused<\/a> the holdouts of \u201cderailing the full administration of justice\u201d \u2014 and DeSantis vowed to change the law back to the way it was before. In 2023, he signed <\/a>legislation to lower the threshold. Today, Florida only requires eight jurors to send a defendant to die.<\/p>\n Donald Trump\u2019s reelection has since generated what DeLiberato describes as a \u201cperfect storm.\u201d U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi has spent the year carrying out<\/a> orders<\/a> to aggressively pursue the death penalty on all fronts, with her home state quick to comply. Florida is now making a name for itself as \u201cthe deadliest state in the country,\u201d DeLiberato said. \u201cAnd that\u2019s just something they\u2019ve decided to own.\u201d<\/p>\n\n