Oklahoma, Alabama and Tennessee are each planning to carry out an execution on the same day this week. It’s the first such triple execution since 2010, and each case involves female victims.
Oklahoma inmate denied clemency after remarks
Carlos Cuesta-Rodriguez refused clemency; board voted 3-1 to deny it. He’s set for execution Aug. 13 for a 2003 murder.
Three states are each set to carry out an execution on the same day this week in what will be the first such triple execution in the country in 16 years.
Alabama is planning to execute Jeremy Williams by lethal injection on Thursday, Aug. 13, for the 2021 rape and murder of a 5-year-old girl. Earlier in the day, Oklahoma plans to execute Carlos Cuesta-Rodriguez for the 2003 murder of his common-law wife, and Tennessee is set to put Anthony Hines to death for the 1985 murder of a mother of four.
The last time three states carried out executions on the same day was in 2010, according to a USA TODAY analysis of data kept by the nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center. That year the executions were in Ohio, Texas and Louisiana.
“It’s very unusual,” Robin Maher, the center’s executive director, said about triple executions.
Though sometimes two executions are held on the same day in the U.S., most of the time it’s only one. Death penalty observers say that double or triple executions are purely coincidental timing.
Like the majority of inmates on death row, the three men being executed on Thursday all killed women or girls. Of 94 executions held since 2024 − including this week’s − 64% of the victims involved were women and girls, according to a USA TODAY analysis.
Here’s what you need to know about the three executions this week, including more about who the victims were.
Jeremy Williams raped, killed Georgia girl, dumped body in Alabama
On Dec. 13, 2021, Jeremy Williams took 5-year-old Kamarie Holland from her home in Columbus City, Georgia, after agreeing to pay the girl’s own mother to sexually abuse the little girl, police say. They believe Kamarie’s mother, Kristy Siple, wanted the money for drugs.
From there, Williams put Kamarie through unimaginable torment, including making her smoke meth, raping her while being filmed, strangling her and then continuing to sexually abuse her after she was dead, according to police.
Unlike the majority of criminal defendants, Williams directed his attorneys to provide no defense for him at his trial in 2024, Edenfield said. When the judge in the case handed down a death sentence, Williams also ordered his attorneys not to appeal.
That’s why Williams is being executed five years after the crime. Most death row inmates are only executed after many years or decades of drawn-out appeals.
Williams, 42, has never expressed remorse for what he did or offered much in the way of an explanation, according to Lt. Jane Edenfield, who investigated the case for the Columbus Police Department in Georgia.
“His words were that he was just sick, and that’s it,” she told USA TODAY in an interview last week.
Jurors found Williams guilty of murder, sodomy, sexual abuse of a child, production of obscene material involving a child, human trafficking and abuse of a corpse. Siple is serving 20 years in prison after pleading guilty to the human sex trafficking of her daughter.
Though she was born to a mother who did an unspeakable thing to her, Kamarie Holland had a large, loving family with many siblings and a devoted dad who always called her Princess, according to police and archived news reports.
Her dad, Corey Holland, had full custody of Kamarie but sometimes let her stay with her mom, Edenfield said. It’s the biggest regret of his life, she said he testified at Williams’ trial. Holland was sobbing on the witness stand as he recalled how much he loved Kamarie.
“You took my little girl from me,” Edenfield remembers him telling Williams, who she said sat emotionless and stone-faced the entire trial.
“I miss you painfully PRINCESS,” Holland wrote on Facebook last month. And in 2022: “I still can’t believe you’re gone. I haven’t felt the same since that day you were taken from me.”
Carlos Cuesta-Rodriguez killed wife in fit of rage in Oklahoma
Olimpia Fisher knew she had to get her common-law husband out of her life and the couple’s Oklahoma City home.
Carlos Cuesta-Rodriguez’s behavior was growing increasingly obsessive, controlling, and violent, according to family, prosecutors, and court records. He stalked the 43-year-old Fisher when she wasn’t home and was fixated on the idea that she was cheating on him with a co-worker.
On the night of May 31, 2003, Fisher and her pregnant 18-year-old daughter had packed their bags and nearly left the Oklahoma City home they shared with Cuesta-Rodriguez. But he had drunk a bottle of tequila and was in bed sleeping, so they figured it was safe to stay the night, court records say.
Instead, a nightmare unfolded when Cuesta-Rodriguez woke up around 4:30 a.m. As her daughter watched in horror, he confronted Fisher with cheating allegations and shot her in the right eye. Eight minutes later as police tried to break in and a still-living Fisher fought to escape, Cuesta-Rodriguez and fatally shot her in the left eye.
Cuesta-Rodriguez’s attorneys argued strongly that he be spared from execution in front of the Oklahoma Board of Parole and Pardon last month. But Cuesta-Rodriguez, 77, shocked the room when he said the last thing he deserved was mercy.
“You must believe that I deserve to suffer. And you’re right,” he said, addressing Fisher’s two daughters. “It’s time for me to pay for what I did.”
Fisher’s oldest daughter, Cynthia Allen, said at the hearing that her mom taught her “how to be humble, how to love life, how to love people.”
“She would tell us, ‘I love you like the sun loves the Earth,'” Allen recalled, saying that her mom said that so often that it’s etched on her tombstone. Allen and her sister now take their six children to visit their grandmother at her gravesite.
Fisher’s other daughter, Katya Wallis, said that her mom was “a great person who did not deserve to die.”
“He took a mother, a grandmother, a friend, the light in our family.”
Anthony Hines killed mom of 4 in Tennessee robbery that netted $100
On March 3, 1985, a 54-year-old mother of four named Catherine Jean Jenkins was working as a maid at a motel in Kingston Springs, Tennessee, when Anthony Darrell Hines attacked her as she cleaned a room.
Hines stole $100 in cash from her, stabbed her to death and then fled in her car, according to court records. Hines, 66, has admitted to taking the car but has maintained that he did not kill Jenkins.
A jury found him guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced him to death.Hines’ attorneys have been fighting his execution amid growing calls for Gov. Bill Lee to call it off in the wake of the state’s botched execution of death row inmate Tony Carruthers in May. Tennessee called off Carruthers’ execution after a doctor failed to insert a backup intravenous line, prompting Lee to grant Carruthers a one-year reprieve.
Hines’ attorney, Kit Thomas, said that all evidence points to the likelihood that the doctor who failed to establish Carruthers’ IV line will be the same one presiding over Hines’ execution. If the state moves forward to execute Hines under such circumstances, it will be a “grotesque spectacle,” Thomas told The Tennessean, part of the USA TODAY Network.
Lee said on Aug. 11 that he would not intervene in Hines’ lethal injection.
Melissa Jenkins recently told The Tennessean that her mom was a gardener and a whiz in the kitchen known for her down-home cooking, specializing in dishes like meat loaf, friend chicken, and macaroni and cheese. She also was a devoted church-goer and loved to play in the snow.
Jenkins said that she fears her mother’s memory has been largely overshadowed by the 40-year delay of justice.
“We knew from the beginning that it was going to be at least a 20-year process of appeals,” she said. ” OK, 20 years I kind of get. But 40? … It’s like my mom has become forgotten along the way.”
Contributing: Molly Davis, The Tennessean and Nolan Clay, The Oklahoman
Amanda Lee Myers is a senior crime reporter who covers cold case investigations and the death penalty for USA TODAY. Follow her on X at @amandaleeusat.