Tennessee, Alabama, and Oklahoma are set to execute inmates via lethal injection on Thursday, marking the first time since 2010 that three people are put to death on the same day in the United States.

All three inmates were sentenced to death for murders. In Tennessee, Anthony Darrell Hines will be executed for the 1985 murder of Catherine Jean Jenkins, a 54-year-old motel maid in Kingston Springs. He was sentenced to death the following year, and despite winning a new sentencing hearing, was again sentenced to death in 1989.

Alabama is set to give 42-year-old Jeremy Williams the lethal injection for the 2021 rape and murder of five-year-old Kamarie Holland. Williams raped and strangled Holland after offering her mother $2,500 for the girl to perform a sex act, prosecutors said. Williams pleaded guilty, declined to appeal, and asked for his death sentence to be carried out.

Russell County District Attorney Richard Chancey said: “To see on video what he did to this baby, what a grown man could do to a child, it’s shocking, it’s horrible, it’s disgusting. It’s just a level of evil.”

In Oklahoma, 70-year-old Carlos Cuesta-Rodriguez will also be executed for fatally shooting his girlfriend Olimpia Fisher in 2003. He would be the third person put to death this year in Oklahoma and the 20th under Republican Governor Kevin Stitt.

Eleven states carried out executions in 2025. If the Tennessee and Alabama lethal injections take place, six states will have had executions in 2026.

The executions are taking place amid a steady decline in support for the death penalty in the US. About 52 percent of Americans say the death penalty is morally acceptable, the lowest number since the 1970s, a poll by Gallup revealed.

The last three executions on the same day happened 16 years ago, in Louisiana, Ohio, and Texas.

Source: www.aljazeera.com