Three States Set to Execute Inmates Thursday

Three men are scheduled to be put to death by lethal injection Thursday in Tennessee, Alabama and Oklahoma.

If all three go forward, it would be the first time in nearly 16 years that three executions took place in the United States on the same day, according to the Associated Press. The AP reports the last such day was Jan. 7, 2010, when Louisiana, Ohio and Texas each put an inmate to death.

A Tennessee man faces execution for killing a motel maid, an Oklahoma man for killing his girlfriend, and an Alabama man for the rape and murder of a 5-year-old girl he paid her mother to let him abuse.

Tennessee: Anthony Darrell Hines

Tennessee plans to execute Anthony Darrell Hines, 66, for the 1985 murder of Catherine Jean Jenkins. 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 sentenced to death again in 1989.

His date comes three months after Tennessee called off the attempted lethal injection of Tony Carruthers because of a problem inserting an IV. During that attempt, the IV team established a primary line right away but then worked for more than an hour trying to insert a backup line — trying Carruthers' arm, hand and foot before attempting a central line, according to his lawyer, who witnessed it. Gov. Bill Lee halted the execution and granted Carruthers a one-year reprieve.

Hines appealed unsuccessfully to the governor and the courts, arguing the doctor who oversaw the May execution was unqualified and likely to botch his execution too, and that his thinness and muscular atrophy after two strokes make IV problems likely. The state has declined to say whether the same doctor will preside. The Tennessee Supreme Court ruled Hines had not proven the doctor was unqualified and suggested the earlier problems were an isolated mishap.

Alabama: Jeremy Williams

Alabama is scheduled to execute Jeremy Williams, 42, for the 2021 rape and murder of Kamarie Holland, a 5-year-old Georgia girl.

Prosecutors said Williams raped and strangled the girl after offering her mother $2,500 for the child to perform a sex act, filmed the attack, and kept her body to continue abusing it. Williams pleaded guilty, declined to appeal, and asked for his death sentence to be carried out. He was also a suspect in the 2005 death of his infant daughter in Alaska, but charges were not filed until 2022. The girl's mother is serving a 20-year prison sentence after pleading guilty to sex trafficking.

It would be Alabama's first execution of the year. A nitrogen gas execution was halted in June after a federal judge ruled the method unconstitutional.

Oklahoma: Carlos Cuesta-Rodriguez

Oklahoma is scheduled to execute Carlos Cuesta-Rodriguez, who was sentenced to death for fatally shooting his girlfriend at their Oklahoma City home in 2003. He has said he regrets the killing and did not ask the state board for clemency.