The state has killed 15 people this year with two more scheduled this month as death penalty in decline across US

Death penalty opponents have decried an unprecedented surge in executions ordered by Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, after the state maintained a record pace with last week’s killing of a military veteran.

Norman Mearle Grim, who was convicted of the 1998 murder and rape of a neighbor, became the 15th person put to death this year, by lethal injection, at the Florida state prison in Starke on Wednesday.

With two active death warrants also signed by DeSantis for prisoners on death row, and their executions scheduled before the end of November, Florida will have shattered its previous record of eight in a calendar year since the supreme court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, set in 1984 and 2014.

“This is what happens when a government loses its conscience. When mercy is replaced with machinery. When killing becomes routine and our leaders tout the body count as an achievement,” a statement from the advocacy group Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty said in part after officials confirmed Grim’s death.