TALLAHASSEE, Fla. – Continuing to ramp up the pace of executions in Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis on Friday signed a death warrant for a man convicted in the 1994 rape and murder of a woman in downtown Orlando.

The warrant was signed for Thomas Gudinas, 51, who is scheduled to be executed June 24 and could be the seventh inmate put to death by lethal injection this year. Five men have been executed, and inmate Anthony Wainwright is scheduled to die June 10.

Gudinas was convicted in the May 1994 murder of Michelle McGrath, who had been out for a night of entertainment in downtown Orlando. McGrath was last seen alive about 2:45 a.m. in the courtyard of a nightclub and was believed to have been attacked as she went to her car in a parking lot, according to a 1995 sentencing order in the case.

McGrath’s body was found about 7:30 a.m. in an alley and had been “savagely raped and severely beaten by the defendant with a blunt instrument,” then-Circuit Judge Belvin Perry Jr. wrote in the sentencing order, which was posted Friday on the Florida Supreme Court website with the death warrant and other material about the case.

“The evidence quite clearly establishes that (the victim) did not meet a swift, merciful and painless death,” the sentencing order said. “The defendant on that night showed a disposition to be violently destructive without scruples or restraint. (The victim) was beaten and taken into an alleyway where she spent her last minutes on this earth. Not only was she beaten in this alleyway, but the defendant barbarically raped her.”

Gudinas was sentenced to death in June 1995 after the trial had been moved to Collier County.

The Gudinas death warrant and other documents were posted on the Supreme Court website Friday without comment from DeSantis — as has been the case with other death warrants he has signed this year.

But the state is clearly increasing the pace of executions, after it put to death one inmate in 2024 and six in 2023. Since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976 after a U.S. Supreme Court decision had halted it, the most executions carried out in Florida in a year were eight — which happened in 1984 and 2014, according to information on the Florida Department of Corrections website.

The state this year executed Glen Rogers on May 15; Jeffrey Hutchinson on May 1; Michael Tanzi on April 8; Edward James on March 20; and James Ford on Feb. 13.

DeSantis has also signed a death warrant for Wainwright, who was convicted of kidnapping a woman in 1994 from a Winn-Dixie supermarket parking lot in Lake City and raping and murdering her in rural Hamilton County. Wainwright’s attorneys have gone to the Florida Supreme Court to try to halt the scheduled June 10 execution