CAPITAL PUNISHMENT Inside the Execution Room

As Florida ends Michael Tanzi’s life, a Newsweek reporter observes his final breath and the ritual of state-sanctioned death

- by JOSHUA RHETT MILLER

IT'S CHILLY AND SILENT INSIDE A WITNESS room adjacent to the execution chamber at Florida State Prison in Raiford. I'm about to witness Michael Anthony Tanzi exhale for the final time as the government's retribution for kidnapping and killing 49-year-old Janet Acosta during a harrowing four-hour nightmare on April 25, 2000.

Moments earlier—on April 8, 2025, almost 25 years to the day that the crime was committed—I was ushered into the small, unadorned viewing room by Florida Department of Corrections staff, who instructed me to remain silent throughout the entire procedure. Welcome to Death Row.

I'm seated in the far corner of the last row in the gallery with 23 other witnesses including Acosta's sister Julie Andrew and her niece Jennifer Vander-Wier. FDC protocol allows relatives of victims to watch alongside invited members of the media, a nurse or medical technician, attorneys for the condemned inmate and a minister of religion, if requested.

The hum of an air conditioner on the wall is the only perceptible sound inside the witness room, where a curtain covers a large pane-glass window that separates us in the gallery from the death chamber. The curtain is raised, and 48-year-old Tanzi is revealed to us in his last moments of life—strapped to a gurney and draped in an oversized white sheet. He briefly picks up his head to glance at the onlookers on the other side of the glass. The execution team warden then picks up a telephone inside the death chamber to determine whether Governor Ron DeSantis granted a last-minute stay of execution. He did not.