US carries out rare triple execution in Oklahoma, Tennessee and Alabama

Carlos Cuesta-Rodriguez was put to death by the state of Oklahoma, in the first of three executions scheduled for Thursday in a rare triple procedure that underlines the renewed appetite in the US for state killings.

Just one hour later, Darrell Hines was put to death by the state of Tennessee, and at 6pm local time in Alabama, that state executed Jeremy Williams.

Cuesta-Rodriguez, 70, was pronounced dead at 10.13am at the Oklahoma state penitentiary in McAlester. He was sentenced to death for murdering his common-law wife, Olimpia Fisher, in 2003. He had unsuccessfully appealed for mercy, saying he was remorseful and had struggled all his life from mental illness.

Cuesta-Rodriguez’s family and friends issued a statement in the wake of his execution, calling his life one of “extraordinary beauty and tenderness within the darkest of conditions”.

“Through small, unglamorous, consistent acts of kindness, he expressed his humanity year after year,” the statement read.

“He was a different man from the one who committed his horrible crime – remorseful every single day, burdened by the weight of what he had done – but defined by decades of living humbly, gently, and with unwavering love and devotion to his family and to inmates far worse off than himself. His legacy will not be measured by his worst moment, but by the countless moments after – the letters that never failed to arrive, the art he created from behind those walls, and the love and light he poured out consistently and unconditionally, proving that even from a place of such darkness, one person’s kindness and redemption can still ripple into the world.”

Hines, 66, was sentenced to death for the 1985 murder of Catherine Jean Jackson Jenkins, a motel maid and mother of four. His lawyers had tried to postpone his execution on grounds that Tennessee’s previous effort to kill a prisoner, Tony Carruthers, in May had failed after a gruesome and prolonged search for a vein.

Katherine Dix, attorney for Hines, called his death a “murder” and said she grieved “the violence the state of Tennessee inflicted on us all today”, including on the prisoner’s son who met him for the first time only four days ago and watched him die.

Dix added: “The leaders of this state repeatedly invoke the sanctity of life, but today the state put to death a man who was blind and paralyzed on his left side, could not walk, and was in constant pain. They lifted his body on to a gurney and wheeled him to the death chamber. May God have mercy on us all.”

The third execution of the day was of Williams, 42, who raped and murdered a five-year-old girl in Georgia in 2021. He pleaded guilty to killing Kamarie Holland and instructed his lawyers not to object to anything prosecutors did during trial, waived sentencing by a jury and did not present any mitigating evidence typically provided during a capital sentencing. He declined to appeal, bringing on his execution at a much faster pace than most death row occupants.

During Williams’s last 24 hours of life, his wife, mother, stepmother, brother and father all visited him, according to the Alabama department of corrections, and he spoke on the phone with his grandmother and aunt.

“I want to thank God for forgiving me for my sins so I can meet him in peace,” Williams said in his final words, according to the Associated Press. The agency reported that Williams rocked his head back-and-forth and smiled and appeared to sing or speak before slowing and becoming still on the gurney.

This is the first time in more than 15 years that there have been three judicial killings in the US on a single day. The one-day surge in death chamber activity was a scheduling coincidence, but it is also a sign of renewed energy among death penalty states.

Last year 47 executions were carried out in the US, a dramatic increase on the previous year’s 25. Much of the increase was generated by one state alone, Florida, which conducted 19 killings under its Republican governor, Ron DeSantis.

All three scheduled executions were due to take place by lethal injection, the procedure that has been the norm in the US since the early 1980s. Alabama had largely switched to a new experimental method, nitrogen gas, but that was halted by a federal judge in June on grounds that it was unconstitutional.