Three US states carry out executions on same day; California moves to commute 548 sentences

Alabama, Florida and Indiana each carried out an execution on Thursday, an unusual day on which three US states put prisoners to death within hours of one another.

Florida

Florida executed Jesse Guardado by three-drug lethal injection, its 19th execution of the year — a record-tying figure for the state. Guardado had pleaded guilty to fatally stabbing a 75-year-old woman inside her Walton county home in 2004 before stealing her jewelry box, $80 and other valuables to buy drugs. The woman had helped him get a job and housing.

Indiana

In Indiana, Jeffrey Weisheit, 50, was pronounced dead at 12.45am at the state prison in Michigan City, said Noelle Russell, spokesperson for the state department of correction. He had no final words.

Weisheit had acknowledged killing his girlfriend's two children in a house fire in the Evansville area in 2010, but had hoped governor Mike Braun would grant clemency and change his sentence to life in prison. Braun declined.

His lawyers also failed to persuade the governor to allow Weisheit to undergo brain scans assessing a history of head injuries and mental health problems. His last objection centered on the state's planned use of lethal drugs bought from a pharmacy facing a disciplinary hearing next week before the Indiana pharmacy board, the state regulatory agency. Indiana attorney general Todd Rokita said the execution provided "long-awaited justice for Alyssa Lynch and her brother Caleb, two innocent children whose lives were stolen in an act of unspeakable cruelty".

Alabama

In Alabama, Michael Taylor died by lethal injection on Thursday evening. In 1991, when he was 19, he beat two people, aged 83 and 79, to death with a metal bar during a robbery in their home in Gadsden.

Death penalty opponents had urged Alabama's Republican governor, Kay Ivey, to reduce Taylor's sentence to life in prison, but she declined. Esther Brown of Project Hope to Abolish the Death Penalty said: "If the state kills Michael, it is not the 19-year-old who made the worst mistake of his life whom it kills. But the mature, well-respected, God-fearing man sitting in that cell today."

The state went forward with plans to execute Taylor, 54, by lethal injection after a judge declared a nitrogen gas method unconstitutional. His attorneys objected to the last-minute switch to lethal injection since he had selected nitrogen gas as his method several years ago, but a judge ruled against Taylor. Alabama executed Kenneth Smith in 2024 by nitrogen asphyxiation, an episode witnesses found excruciating, after previously failing to kill him using lethal injection.

A contrasting decision in California

Thursday's executions came as California's governor, Gavin Newsom, announced he would commute all 548 death sentences in his state, saying he believed "state-sanctioned killing is incompatible with California's values".

The move contrasted with Florida, where outgoing Republican governor Ron DeSantis has made aggressive use of the death penalty; Florida has carried out more than half of the 34 executions in the US so far this year.

It is the second time since August that three states were set to carry out executions on a single day. Before this year, the last time it happened was 2010. The death penalty has faced renewed scrutiny since the September failed execution of Christa Pike in Tennessee, although courts have rejected efforts to halt other executions after she survived two massive doses of pentobarbital.

Source: The Guardian.