Mark Asay

On July 17, 1987, Asay, his brother Robbie, and friend Bubba, visited multiple bars in Jacksonville, Florida, where they drank beer and played pool. After leaving a bar in the early hours of July 18, the three men decided to head downtown to find some prostitutes. Once there, Robbie began speaking with another man, 34-year-old Robert Lee Booker, who was black. Asay grew angry and started shouting racial slurs at Booker. After the two got into a confrontation, Asay took out a gun from his back pocket and shot Booker once in the abdomen. Booker ran from the area but succumbed to his gunshot wound. The bullet penetrated Booker's intestines as well as an artery, which caused internal hemorrhaging. Booker's body was found later that day under the edge of a house. Robbie fled the area after the shooting while Asay and Bubba left in a truck. When Bubba asked him why he had shot Booker, Asay responded, "Because you got to show a nigger who is boss." Asay did not believe he had killed Booker after shooting him. Afterward, Asay and Bubba continued to look for prostitutes. Bubba then spotted a prostitute whom he only knew as "Renee" who he believed would give them oral sex. Both men were unaware that Renee was actually a 26-year-old mixed-race white and Hispanic man named Robert McDowell, who dressed as a woman. After speaking with McDowell, the two negotiated a deal for oral sex. Bubba drove himself and Asay to a nearby alley and McDowell followed them. Once there, Asay left the truck so Bubba and McDowell could have sex. As McDowell got into the truck, Asay suddenly returned, grabbed McDowell's arm, pulled him from the truck, and shot at him. Asay shot McDowell six times as he attempted to escape. Asay and Bubba then drove away, with Asay claiming he shot McDowell because "the bitch had beat me out of ten dollars on a blow job." McDowell's body was found on the ground in the alley not long after the shooting. According to a medical examiner, McDowell had been shot three times in the chest cavity, any of which would have been fatal. ==Capture and trial==

Asay later told two acquaintances that he shot McDowell because he had allegedly cheated him out of ten dollars in a drug deal. The acquaintances also testified that Asay had claimed to shoot McDowell four times in the chest and that he shot him again once he had fallen to the ground. Asay's death sentences were upheld in 1991 and 2000. Asay later admitted to a Jacksonville television station that he killed McDowell but maintained his innocence in the murder of Booker. ==Execution==

Asay was first scheduled to be executed on March 17, 2016. However, on March 2, the Supreme Court of Florida halted the execution after the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that Florida's death penalty laws were unconstitutional, a ruling that was made in January 2016 following Hurst v. Florida. Asay's execution warrant had been signed by Governor Rick Scott prior to the ruling in early January. On July 3, 2017, following months of Florida's death penalty laws being left in legal limbo, Scott signed Asay's execution warrant, scheduling him for execution on August 24, 2017. Asay was to be executed via lethal injection. The execution method that was to be used included two drugs that had never been used before in a Florida execution: etomidate, an anaesthetic agent used for the induction of general anaesthesia and sedation⁠ and which had never been used anywhere for an execution, in lieu of potassium acetate, which had been used only once before in the United States, by accident, in an Oklahoma execution. The lethal injection combination was new, due to states struggling to acquire the drugs needed for lethal injection. His last meal consisted of fried pork chops, fried ham, French fries, vanilla swirl ice cream, and a can of Coke. A Florida Department of Corrections official later stated that the execution had occurred without any incident and that Asay did not speak or show any indication of pain during the execution procedure. Asay's execution marked the first time in Florida state history that a white person was executed for killing a black person, something that had never happened before in Florida since capital punishment first began in the state in 1769. However, only one of Asay's victims (Booker) was black. The other victim (McDowell) was a mixed-race man of white and Hispanic descent, but during Asay's trial, the court mistakenly believed that McDowell was also black. This caused the Supreme Court of Florida to issue a rare not long before Asay's execution, in which they acknowledged that for more than twenty years they had mistakenly believed that McDowell was black. Asay remained the only white person to be executed in Florida for killing a black person until the 2025 execution of Samuel Lee Smithers. In 1926, a white man Britt Pringle was sentenced to death for the axe murder of a black man. He was nearly executed several times. In one instance, he came within an hour of execution, at which point his head had already been shaven in preparation for his death in the state's electric chair. However, in 1933, Pringle was declared insane and thus unfit for execution. ==See also==