3 States Execute Killers on the Same Day

Tennessee and Oklahoma put inmates to death within 30 minutes of each other Thursday, and Alabama followed suit hours later as states executed three men by injection in one day for the first time since 2010, the AP reports.

• The last time three executions were held on the same day was Jan. 7, 2010, when Louisiana, Ohio, and Texas put inmates to death. Three executions were scheduled on the same day in 2018, but only one went forward after a Texas man was granted a reprieve and prison officials in Alabama had problems with the IV line.

• Oklahoma. In Oklahoma, Carlos Cuesta-Rodriguez, 70, died by lethal injection at 10:13am CDT at the state's penitentiary in rural McAlester. He said he did not have any last words but mouthed "I love you" to two relatives. He was the third person put to death this year in Oklahoma.
• Convicted of fatally shooting his girlfriend at their Oklahoma City home in 2003, Cuesta-Rodriguez had said he regretted killing Olimpia Fisher and didn't ask a board for clemency. Fisher, 43, planned to leave Cuesta-Rodriguez when he shot her in one eye and then waited about eight minutes as she screamed for help before firing the fatal shot into her other eye. "He made her suffer because she dared to live beyond his control," Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond told the state's Pardon and Parole Board on July 14.

• Tennessee. In Tennessee, Anthony Darrell Hines died by lethal injection at 10:43am CDT for the 1985 murder of Catherine Jean Jenkins. His final words were: "Tell my son hello." Hines stabbed Jenkins to death while the 54-year-old was working as a motel maid in Kingston Springs. He was sentenced to death in 1986, won an appeal for a new sentencing hearing, and was again sentenced to death in 1989.
• Hines' execution date comes just three months after the attempted lethal injection of another man was called off because of a problem inserting an IV. Hines, 66, appealed unsuccessfully to the governor and the courts, saying that the doctor who oversaw the May execution was unqualified and likely to botch his execution as well. He said his thinness and muscular atrophy after two strokes mean he could face problems with an IV as well.
• Alabama. Alabama executed Jeremy Williams by injection for the 2021 rape and murder of a 5-year-old Georgia girl. Williams, who pleaded guilty to killing Kamarie Holland, declined to appeal and asked for his death sentence to be carried out. Williams filmed his attack on the girl and kept her body to continue to abuse, prosecutors said. The girl's mother is serving a 20-year prison sentence after pleading guilty to sex trafficking.
• Williams was also a suspect in the 2005 death of his infant daughter in Alaska but charges were not filed until 2022. It was Alabama's first execution of the year. A nitrogen gas execution was halted in June after a federal judge ruled the method unconstitutional.

This file has been updated with the execution in Alabama.