Three States Set for Same-Day Executions, a First Since 2010
Tennessee, Alabama and Oklahoma plan to execute inmates Thursday in what would be the first time in nearly 16 years that three people are put to death on the same day in the United States. The executions come as a small number of states drive execution numbers across the country, according to NBC News.
A Rare Coordinated Schedule
The last time three executions were held on the same day was Jan. 7, 2010, when Louisiana, Ohio and Texas put inmates to death. Three executions were also scheduled on the same day in 2018, but only one went forward after a Texas man was granted a reprieve and prison officials in Alabama encountered problems with an IV line.
Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, said it is highly unusual to have three executions on one day, although it is largely a scheduling coincidence. “You look at the country as a whole, you’ve just got this little pocket of five or six states that are using the death penalty, executing people, and a small number of states that are still imposing new death sentences,” Maher said.
The Broader Death Penalty Landscape
The scheduled executions come amid a significant surge in capital punishment across the United States. Eleven states executed a total of 47 people in 2025, the highest number since 2009, according to The Guardian. Florida led the surge with 19 executions, while Alabama, South Carolina and Texas each carried out five. Tennessee carried out three, and Oklahoma, Mississippi, Arizona and Indiana each carried out two.
The 19 executions so far in 2026 have occurred in four states, with Florida again leading the country after executing two inmates on the same day in July. The increase follows President Trump’s executive order on Jan. 20, 2025, titled “Restoring the Death Penalty,” which vowed to ensure “that the laws that authorize capital punishment are respected and faithfully implemented.”
Despite the surge in executions, Gallup found that only 52% of Americans support the death penalty for people convicted of murder — a 50-year low. Most Americans under age 55 now oppose the practice. The Death Penalty Information Center noted “the growing disconnect between what elected officials do and what the public wants.”
Tennessee: Concerns Over a Botched Execution
Tennessee plans to execute Anthony Darrell Hines, 66, three months after the attempted lethal injection of another inmate was called off because of problems inserting an IV. During the attempted execution of Tony Carruthers in May, the IV team established a primary line right away but then worked for more than an hour trying to insert a required backup line. The execution was ultimately called off, and Carruthers was given a one-year reprieve.
“All eyes really are on Tennessee at this moment because of the problem that happened,” Maher said.
Hines, convicted of stabbing Catherine Jean Jenkins to death in 1985 while she worked as a motel maid in Kingston Springs, has seized on the problems with the previous execution. He says his health issues — including two strokes that left him partially paralyzed — increase the risk of difficulties at his execution. He has unsuccessfully asked the governor and courts to intervene, claiming the doctor who oversaw that execution was unqualified and is likely to botch his execution as well.
Gov. Bill Lee has declined to take any action on Hines’ requests. “After deliberate consideration of Anthony Darrell Hines’ request for clemency, and after a thorough review of the case, I am upholding the sentence of the State of Tennessee and do not plan to intervene,” Lee said, as reported by WSMV. Last week, the Tennessee Supreme Court ruled against a stay of his execution. The state has declined to say whether the same doctor will preside over the upcoming execution.
Hines’ attorney, Kit Thomas, said moving forward with the execution “would be a grotesque spectacle.” “All of the available evidence suggests that [the Tennessee Department of Corrections] intends to rely on Dr. Fowler despite his disastrous mishandling of the attempted execution of Mr. Carruthers,” Thomas said. “TDOC knows that Dr. Fowler can’t do the job the protocol requires him to do, and we’ve seen what that means in practice: a torturous, failed procedure that leaves staff, witnesses, and the prisoner traumatized.”
Eight fellow Tennessee Republican lawmakers have called on Gov. Lee to halt the execution and review the state’s lethal injection protocol, and dozens of medical professionals have expressed concern about the execution.
Alabama: A Volunteer Seeking Death
Alabama is scheduled to execute Jeremy Williams, 42, by lethal injection for the 2021 rape and murder of 5-year-old Kamarie Holland. Williams, who pleaded guilty, has asked for his death sentence to be carried out.
Prosecutors said Williams raped and strangled Holland after offering her mother $2,500 for the child to perform oral sex on him. Williams filmed his attack on the girl and kept her body to continue to abuse, prosecutors said. In 2022, Williams also was charged with the 2005 death of his infant daughter in Alaska.
“This man left a trail of destruction of children,” Russell County District Attorney Richard Chancey said.
About 10% of executed inmates are so-called volunteers who drop appeals, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, but most of those have been on death row longer. The time between Williams’ 2024 conviction and his scheduled lethal injection is unusually brief, Maher said.
It will be Alabama’s first execution of the year if it goes forward. A nitrogen gas execution was halted in June after a federal judge ruled the method unconstitutional.
Kamarie’s father, Corey Holland, was barred from witnessing the execution due to a pending child endangerment charge. “This is so hurtful because if anybody deserves to be there it should be me,” Holland said, as reported by WTVM. “Nobody gonna be in that room who loves Kamarie more than me.”
Oklahoma: Clemency Denied
Oklahoma is scheduled to execute Carlos Cuesta-Rodriguez, 70, for the 2003 murder of his girlfriend, Olimpia Fisher. If the lethal injection goes forward, he will be the third person executed in Oklahoma this year.
Prosecutors said Fisher, 43, had been making plans to leave Cuesta-Rodriguez when he shot her in one eye and then waited about eight minutes as she screamed for help before firing the fatal shot into her other eye. Fisher’s daughter Katya Wallace witnessed the shooting when she was 18 and five months pregnant.
Oklahoma’s Pardon and Parole Board voted 3-1 last month against recommending clemency for Cuesta-Rodriguez. His attorneys had asked the board to recommend he serve life in prison without parole, citing a difficult childhood, brain damage from a bus accident at age 7, PTSD, and major depression with psychotic episodes.
But Cuesta-Rodriguez told the board that he did not want clemency. “I can’t have been in my right mind to have done something so horrific,” he said through a Spanish-language translator, according to USA Today. “I have not been able to find any sense in all this.”
Analysis: A System Under Scrutiny
The triple execution day highlights the concentrated nature of capital punishment in the United States, where a small group of states accounts for the overwhelming majority of executions. The U.S. remains separated from almost all other developed countries in its use of capital punishment; only Japan, Singapore and Taiwan have staged executions in recent years.
Legal experts point to a shifting judicial landscape. “We’re now operating a capital punishment system without a safety net,” Alexis Hoag-Fordjour, a law professor at Brooklyn Law School, said. “Federal courts are meant to act as a backstop, but that stop gap has been eviscerated.” The U.S. Supreme Court denied every request to stay an execution in 2025.
The Catholic Mobilizing Network has called for stopping all three executions scheduled for Aug. 13, citing Catholic teaching that the death penalty is “an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person.” The organization noted Hines’ severe incapacitation from strokes, Williams’ status as the first lethal injection in Alabama in over a year, and Cuesta-Rodriguez’s clemency denial on a 3-1 vote.
What to Watch For
The executions are scheduled to proceed Thursday barring last-minute legal interventions. Tennessee’s execution of Hines will be closely watched given the state’s recent difficulties with lethal injection procedures. If all three executions go forward, it will mark the first time since 2010 that three people have been put to death on the same day in the United States — a stark symbol of the ongoing national debate over capital punishment.