Florida and Alabama plan to execute two men Thursday for killing older adults during home robberies, just hours after Indiana put a prisoner to death in the first of three lethal injections scheduled for the same day in the U.S.
It would be Florida’s 19th execution this year under Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, matching a record set by the state in 2025, and the second time this year that three people would be put to death on the same day.
The death penalty has faced renewed scrutiny since the September failed execution of Christa Pike in Tennessee, although courts have rejected efforts to halt other executions after she survived two doses of pentobarbital.
In Indiana, Jeffrey Weisheit, 50, was pronounced dead at 12:45 a.m. at the state prison in Michigan City, said Noelle Russell, spokesperson at the Department of Correction.
She said Weisheit’s final meal was barbecue ribs and he had no final words. He had acknowledged killing his girlfriend's two children in a house fire in the Evansville area in 2010 but had hoped that Gov. Mike Braun would grant clemency and change his sentence to life in prison. Braun declined.
Florida has carried out more than half the 32 executions in the U.S. so far this year. DeSantis, who leaves office in January, has said he wants to bring justice to families who have waited decades for death sentences to be carried out.
Jesse Guardado confessed and quickly pleaded guilty to fatally stabbing a 75-year-old woman inside her Walton County home in 2004 before stealing her jewelry box, $80 and other valuables to buy drugs. She had helped him get a job and housing.
A federal appeals court in 2024 said that Guardado, now 64, had received a “full and fair” hearing during the death penalty phase of his case.
In 1991, Michael Taylor, then 19, fatally beat two people, ages 83 and 79, with a metal bar during a robbery in their Gadsden, Alabama, home. Police arrested him with the victims’ Cadillac an hour away in Birmingham.
Death penalty opponents had urged Republican Gov. Kay Ivey to reduce Taylor’s sentence to life in prison, noting his age and immaturity at the time of the killings. She declined.
“If the state kills Michael, it is not the 19-year-old who made the worst mistake of his life who it kills. But the mature, well-respected, God-fearing man sitting in that cell today,” said Esther Brown of Project Hope to Abolish the Death Penalty.
The state plans to execute Taylor, 54, by lethal injection after a judge declared a nitrogen gas method unconstitutional. His attorneys objected to the last-minute switch to lethal injection since he selected nitrogen gas as his method several years ago, but a judge ruled against Taylor.
In Indiana, lawyers failed to persuade Braun, a Republican, to allow Weisheit to undergo brain scans in an effort to reinforce their argument that he has a history of head injuries and mental health problems that should foreclose execution.
Weisheit's last objection centered on the state's planned use of lethal drugs purchased from a pharmacy that is facing a disciplinary hearing next week at the Indiana Pharmacy Board.
The execution provided “long-awaited justice for Alyssa Lynch and her brother Caleb, two innocent children whose lives were stolen in an act of unspeakable cruelty," Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita said.
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Fischer reported from Fort Lauderdale, Florida and Chandler from Montgomery, Alabama. Associated Press reporter Ed White contributed from Detroit.
