Three Executions Set as U.S. Death Penalty Rises

DeSantis has backed legal changes that make it easier to carry out executions. Florida lowered the number of jurors needed to recommend death from a unanimous 12 to eight in 2023, and it made sexual battery on a child under 12 a capital offense. The governor has called the death penalty a strong deterrent and the right punishment for the worst offenders. In Florida, the governor alone can sign a death warrant for prisoners who have no more appeals, without court oversight.

Debate over the punishment goes beyond whether it should exist. How executions are carried out has become a major point of conflict, especially as pharmaceutical companies have resisted supplying drugs for lethal injection. Those shortages pushed South Carolina to use a firing squad in 2025. At the same time, reports of botched executions have renewed criticism. The Death Penalty Information Center says an estimated 3% of U.S. executions from 1890 to 2010 were botched, with lethal injection producing the highest rate of failures. It also said more than a third of executions in 2022 were botched or highly problematic.

The Tennessee case has drawn attention because of a failed execution attempt in May involving Tony Von Carruthers, who had been on death row for decades. State officials tried for more than an hour to carry out a lethal injection, and witness accounts said blood streamed down his chest and that he repeatedly told staff he was in pain. Governor Bill Lee later granted him a one-year reprieve and said the attempt was not botched, arguing instead that medical staff could not establish IV access. Hines is scheduled to die under the same protocol.

Williams is set to become Alabama’s first execution of 2026. He was convicted in the rape and murder of a 5-year-old girl and has dismissed his attorneys, while Governor Kay Ivey has said she does not plan to grant clemency. Cuesta-Rodriguez, who was convicted in the murder of a woman in 2003, has asked for no mercy. At 71, he is also viewed by experts as facing a higher risk of a problematic execution. Across the country, support for the death penalty is softening: a Gallup poll found 52% of Americans now say it is morally acceptable, the lowest level since the 1970s, while juries issued only 23 death sentences in 2025, far below the hundreds returned in the 1990s. For Americans, the next question is whether Thursday’s executions go forward and whether the country’s renewed reliance on capital punishment keeps climbing or keeps losing public ground.