Three men are scheduled to be executed on Thursday in Tennessee, Alabama and Oklahoma — the first time three executions have been carried out on the same single day in the United States since January 2010. The planned lethal injections of Anthony Darrell Hines, 66, in Tennessee; Jeremy Williams, 42, in Alabama; and Carlos Cuesta-Rodriguez, 70, in Oklahoma, are a scheduling coincidence, according to Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, but they throw a sharp light on a broader and deliberate surge in capital punishment across a small number of American states.
The three cases are distinct in character. Hines was convicted of stabbing a 54-year-old motel maid to death in Tennessee in 1985 and has maintained his innocence; he is also bedridden following two strokes, which his lawyers argue raises the risk of a painful, botched procedure. His execution is particularly closely watched because Tennessee attempted — and abandoned — a lethal injection in May, when prison staff spent more than an hour failing to insert a required backup IV line into another inmate, Tony Carruthers, as blood streamed down his chest. Tennessee Governor Bill Lee declined to grant Hines a reprieve, and the state's Supreme Court rejected a stay last week. Williams, convicted in 2024 for the rape and murder of a five-year-old girl in Georgia, has dismissed his lawyers and asked to be put to death — an unusually short interval between conviction and execution. Cuesta-Rodriguez was convicted of the 2003 murder of his girlfriend, Olimpia Fisher, whom he shot twice while she screamed for help; he told a parole board he wanted no clemency and expressed remorse through a Spanish-language translator.
The executions reflect a steep rise in capital punishment driven by a handful of states. In 2025, 47 people were executed across 11 states — the highest figure since 2009 and more than four times the 2021 total. Florida alone accounted for 19 of those deaths, a surge experts attribute largely to Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, who in 2023 lowered the jury threshold needed to recommend a death sentence from a unanimous 12 jurors to 8, and expanded capital offences to include sexual battery of a child under 12. At the federal level, President Donald Trump reinstated the federal death penalty by executive order on his first day back in office in January 2025, reversing a moratorium maintained under President Biden, and his administration has expanded permitted execution methods to include firing squad and streamlined internal processes to accelerate cases. No federal executions have yet been carried out under the new order, however, and experts caution that Trump's full impact on capital punishment will only become clear years from now, given the length of the legal process and mandatory appeals.
Why this matters: the rise in executions is running against the grain of public and jury opinion. Just 52% of Americans now consider the death penalty morally acceptable, the lowest figure in Gallup polling since the 1970s. More strikingly, the number of death sentences handed down by juries has collapsed — from more than 300 a year in the 1990s to just 23 in 2025. Execution methods themselves have become contested, with pharmaceutical companies refusing to supply drugs for lethal injections and a string of troubled procedures raising humanitarian concerns. An estimated 3% of all US executions between 1890 and 2010 involved some form of botching, with lethal injection recording the highest failure rate of any method. Whether Thursday's executions proceed without incident — or whether any of the three men receive a last-minute reprieve — is, for now, an open question.