Red States Set To Carry Out Rare Same-Day Triple Execution

Three conservative states plan to carry out a rare triple execution Thursday involving men ages 42 to 70, two of whom are convicted of murdering women, and one is convicted of raping and murdering a 5-year-old girl.

For the first time in over a decade, Alabama, Oklahoma, and Tennessee plan to execute three men by lethal injection on the same day, including a 66-year-old convicted of murdering a motel maid, a 70-year-old guilty of shooting his girlfriend, and a 42-year-old who confessed to the brutal slaying of a young girl he paid her mother to abuse. 

The United States has not executed three men on the same day since January 7, 2010, according to the Associated Press. 

In Alabama, Jeremy Williams, 42, is scheduled to die Thursday evening for the 2021 rape and murder of 5-year-old Kamarie Holland, whose disappearance sparked a desperate search-and-rescue effort, according to WTVM. 

Phone records determined that Williams and the child’s mother, Kristy Siple, conspired the night before the 5-year-old was reported missing on December 13, 2021. Siple sold her daughter to Williams for $2,500 in exchange for one hour of oral sex. Police found the child’s strangled body dumped outside an abandoned home. 

A jury found Williams guilty on all capital murder charges, and a judge sentenced him to death. Williams later waived his appeals, allowing Republican Governor Kay Ivey to move up his execution date. The child’s mother is serving 20 years in prison for human sex trafficking charges, according to USA Today. 

“This guy brought a tremendous amount of pain and hurt to several, several little girls, and he don’t deserve to breathe the air that you and I breathe,” Sheriff Heath Taylor told WJTV. “And that’s just the way I feel.”

In Tennessee, Anthony Darrell Hines, 66, was scheduled to be executed at 10 a.m. local time Thursday at a maximum-security prison in Nashville for the 1985 murder of motel maid Catherine Jean Jenkins, according to local outlet WZTV. A jury convicted Hines of first-degree felony murder after Jenkins was found naked, wrapped in a sheet, inside a motel room. Hines stabbed Jenkins multiple times in the chest and other areas of the body. 

Earlier this week, Republican Tennessee Governor Bill Lee refused to intervene to stop the execution. 

“After deliberate consideration of Anthony Darrell Hines’ request for clemency, and after a thorough review of the case, I am upholding the sentence of the State of Tennessee and do not plan to intervene,” he said. 

In Oklahoma, Carlos Cuesta-Rodriguez, 70, is set to die by lethal injection at the state’s penitentiary for killing his longtime girlfriend more than 20 years ago. Rodriguez shot Olimpia Fisher in the eye in 2003 at the couple’s Oklahoma City home in what police described as a “gruesome and chaotic” scene, according to KOCO. 

The Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board voted 3-1 in July against clemency, which Cuesta-Rodriguez told members he did not want.

“Carlos Cuesta-Rodriguez violently assaulted and murdered an innocent mother,” Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond said in a statement to KOCO. “Olimpia’s family has endured heartbreak for 23 years. Justice will be served when the death penalty is carried out.”

In July, Florida became the first state in nearly a decade to conduct two executions in a single day as Republican Governor Ron DeSantis’ administration continues to move on death penalty cases at an unprecedented rate.

In April, President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice directed the Bureau of Prisons to bring back the firing squad and lethal injection for federal executions.