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Triple executions scheduled
Tennessee, Alabama and Oklahoma are set to execute inmates via lethal injection on Thursday in what would be the first time since 2010 that three people are put to death on the same day in the United States.
“Tennessee, Alabama and Oklahoma are set to execute inmates via lethal injection”
In Tennessee, Anthony Darrell Hines, 66, will be executed for the 1985 murder of Catherine Jean Jenkins, a 54-year-old woman working as a motel maid in Kingston Springs.
In Alabama, 42-year-old Jeremy Williams is scheduled for lethal injection for the 2021 rape and murder of five-year-old Kamarie Holland, after prosecutors said he raped and strangled her following an offer of $2,500 to her mother for the girl to perform a sex act.
In Oklahoma, 70-year-old Carlos Cuesta-Rodriguez will also be executed for fatally shooting his girlfriend Olimpia Fisher in 2003, in a case that would make him the 20th person put to death under Republican Governor Kevin Stitt.
The executions are taking place as support for the death penalty declines, with the Gallup poll cited by Al Jazeera showing about 52 percent of Americans say it is morally acceptable, the lowest number since the 1970s.
IV problems and quotes
Tennessee’s execution plans for Anthony Darrell Hines are shadowed by the state’s prior lethal injection attempt, when Gov. Bill Lee called off the execution of Tony Carruthers after medical staff worked for more than an hour trying to insert a backup line.
NPR reported that Hines, 66, appealed unsuccessfully to the governor and the courts, arguing that the doctor who oversaw the May execution was unqualified and likely to botch his execution, and that his thinness and muscular atrophy after two strokes could create IV problems.
Alabama’s Jeremy Williams case is framed by Russell County District Attorney Richard Chancey’s remarks that “To see on video what he did to this baby, what a grown man could do to a child, it’s shocking, it’s horrible, it’s disgusting,” as Williams pleaded guilty, declined to appeal and asked for his death sentence to be carried out.
In Oklahoma, the Guardian described Carlos Cuesta-Rodriguez’s execution as the first of three scheduled for Thursday, noting he was pronounced dead at 10.13am at the Oklahoma state penitentiary in McAlester.
The Guardian also reported that Cuesta-Rodriguez’s family and friends issued a statement calling his life one of “extraordinary beauty and tenderness within the darkest of conditions,” while the third execution in Alabama was of Jeremy Williams, 42.
What happens next
If the three lethal injections go forward, it would be the first time in more than 15 years that there have been three judicial killings in the US on a single day, with the Guardian saying the scheduling coincidence still underlines a renewed appetite in death penalty states.
“it would be the first time in more than 15 years that there have been three judicial killings”
The New York Times reported that Tennessee and Oklahoma each executed an inmate on Thursday morning using lethal injection, and that a third execution in Alabama would be the first time in more than a decade that three people on death row are killed on the same day if it proceeds.
In Oklahoma, the New York Times said officials at the Oklahoma Department of Corrections confirmed that Carlos Cuesta-Rodriguez died at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester, and that he was pronounced dead at 10:13 a.m. with no final words, witnesses said.
In Tennessee, the New York Times reported that Anthony Darrell Hines was pronounced dead half an hour later at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, and that he directed his last words to his son, who was present for the execution.
Across the three states, the BBC said the scheduled executions of Anthony Darrell Hines, Jeremy Williams and Carlos Cuesta Rodríguez are indicative of a sharp rise in executions in the United States, with the BBC noting that last year the country carried out executions four times higher than in 2021.
