Alabama, Florida and Indiana all carried out executions on Thursday in an unusual instance of three states administering the death penalty on the same day, according to The Guardian. Before this year, the last time it happened was 2010.
In Florida, the state executed Jesse Guardado via a three-drug lethal injection in its record-tying 19th execution of the year. Guardado had pleaded guilty to fatally stabbing a 75-year-old woman inside her Walton county home in 2004 before stealing jewelry and other valuables to buy drugs. Florida has carried out more than half of the 34 executions so far this year in the US.
Hours earlier, Indiana executed Jeffrey Weisheit, 50, for killing his girlfriend's two children in a house fire in the Evansville area in 2010. He was pronounced dead at 12.45am at the state prison in Michigan City and had no final words, a corrections spokesperson said. He had hoped Governor Mike Braun would grant clemency and change his sentence to life in prison; Braun declined.
In Alabama, Michael Taylor died by lethal injection Thursday evening for his conviction in a fatal home robbery. In 1991, when he was 19, he beat two people, aged 83 and 79, to death with a metal bar during a robbery in their home in Gadsden. Governor Kay Ivey declined requests to reduce his sentence to life. The executions came the same day California's Gavin Newsom announced he would commute all 548 death sentences in his state.