United States approaches a bloody record this Thursday. Three executions are scheduled for this day in the states of Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Alabama. The first of them — affecting Carlos Cuesta-Rodriguez, convicted of killing his girlfriend in 2005 — has already taken place. If the other two also end up being carried out, it will be the first time in 16 years that three people are executed on the same day.
More than 1,600 prisoners have died sentenced to the death penalty since the United States reinstated it in the 1970s, the vast majority by state authorities. The peak of executions was reached in 1999, approaching one hundred. Since then, the number had been decreasing until last year, when it rose again to 47.
Up to July of this year, 19 people had died as a result of this penalty, so if the three executions scheduled for this Thursday are carried out, the cruel number for 2026 so far will reach 22. Iran is the country in the world that carries out the most executions. In 2025 there were 2,159, representing 80% of the death penalty deaths worldwide that are known.
Cuesta-Rodríguez, 70 years old, died from a lethal injection at the McAlester state penitentiary in Oklahoma. He is the third person executed this year in that state and the twentieth under the mandate of Republican Governor Kevin Stitt, who will leave office in January after eight years. Cuesta-Rodríguez, convicted of shooting his girlfriend, Olimpia Fisher, in their home in Oklahoma City in 2003, had expressed remorse for his actions and did not ask for clemency.
Fisher, 43 years old, had planned to leave Cuesta-Rodríguez when he shot her in one eye. He waited a few minutes while she called for help before delivering the fatal blow with a shot to the other eye. “He made her suffer because she dared to live outside his control,” Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond declared on July 14 before the State Pardon and Parole Board, according to the AP agency.
As for the other executions scheduled for this Thursday, a man from Tennessee faces the death penalty for murdering a motel waitress. And a man from Alabama will be executed after waiving all his appeals for the murder of a five-year-old girl, whose mother he paid to be able to abuse her.
Last year, 11 of the 50 states in the country carried out death sentences. If the three scheduled for this Thursday are carried out, in the eight months of this year there will be six states that take this measure. The death penalty has been abolished in 23 states, while three (California, Oregon, and Pennsylvania) have active moratoriums.
The last time the U.S. prison system ended the lives of three people in one day was January 7, 2010. Then, the executions took place in the states of Louisiana, Ohio, and Texas. The same was about to happen in 2018, but only one death sentence was executed, as the Texas convict’s sentence was suspended and Alabama had trouble finding the vein of the subject.
