Three men will be executed the same day as US sees steep rise in death penalty

Anthony Darrell Hines, 66, who has maintained his innocence for four years and is bedridden, is scheduled to be executed in Tennessee on Thursday under the same protocol that failed twelve weeks ago with Carruthers.

In Alabama, Jeremy Williams, convicted for the rape and murder of a 5-year-old girl in 2021, could be the southern state’s first execution of 2026. Williams, who has dismissed his attorneys and has volunteered to be put to death, is slated to die by lethal injection and Alabama Governor Kay Ivey has said she does not plan to grant clemency.

In Oklahoma, septuagenarian Carlos Cuesta-Rodriguez has asked for no clemency and no mercy for the murder of a woman in 2003. He is also slated to die by lethal injection on Thursday, but his age, experts say, heightens his risk for a botched execution.

Thursday’s planned executions are occurring amid a steady decline of support for the death penalty.

“It’s the opposite of a cheap easy political fix,” said Maya Foa, CEO of Reprieve US, an international legal organisation opposed to the death penalty.

Just 52% of Americans say the death penalty is morally acceptable, the lowest number since the 1970s, a Gallup poll shows. Although over half of Americans are in favour, the decline shows shifting trends, Maher said.

And that weakening support is also reflected in the decline in the number of death sentences that are issued by juries. In the 1990s, juries across the country would issue upwards of 300 death sentences in a year. In 2025, they issued only 23.

“That tells us something very important: These are regular citizens that are sitting in judgment of people who are accused of committing the worst possible crimes, and then deciding what sentence fits those crimes,” Maher said. “Those juries are increasingly saying that a death sentence is not the right answer.”