Florida, Alabama and Indiana are scheduled to execute prisoners Thursday. If all three executions proceed, it will be the second day this year on which three people on death row are put to death. The first was Aug. 13, when Oklahoma, Tennessee and Alabama carried out executions within hours of one another.
Thursday’s execution would bring Florida’s total for 2026 to 19, matching the state’s annual record, set last year. Alabama is preparing for its third execution this year, while Indiana is set to conduct its first.
Florida plans to execute Jesse Guardado, 64, who confessed to killing Jackie Malone, 75, in 2004 and pleaded guilty. Malone had helped him find work and housing. Guardado stabbed her in her home, then took a jewelry box, $80 and other belongings to support his drug addiction.
Grace Hanna, executive director of Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, said Guardado had accepted responsibility and expressed remorse. She also urged Florida to consider its own responsibility for his childhood and called on the state to stop the execution.
Florida has increased its use of the death penalty since Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis began signing multiple death warrants in 2025. The state carried out 19 executions last year, the most by any Florida governor in a single year since the death penalty returned in 1976. That was about 40% of the 47 executions nationwide in 2025.
More than half of the 32 executions carried out across the country so far in 2026 have taken place in Florida. In July, the state executed two prisoners on the same day, the first time in nearly a decade that one state had carried out a double execution.
Alabama is scheduled to execute Michael Taylor, 54, for the 1991 murders of an older couple during a robbery at their home. The victims were beaten with a metal bar. Taylor was arrested in Birmingham, about an hour away, while driving their Cadillac.
State officials plan to use lethal injection. A judge rejected Taylor’s attorneys’ challenge to that method. Taylor had previously asked to be executed using nitrogen gas, and his lawyers tried to preserve that option.
Opponents of the death penalty appealed to Republican Gov. Kay Ivey to change Taylor’s sentence to life in prison. They argued that he was only 19 at the time of the crimes and too young to fully understand the consequences.
Esther Brown of Project Hope to Abolish the Death Penalty said that executing Taylor would mean putting to death not just the young man who committed the crime, but also the respected, religious person he has become. Ivey denied the requests for clemency, leaving the execution on schedule.
In Indiana, Jeffrey Weisheit, 50, is due to be executed for setting a house fire in 2010 that killed his girlfriend’s children, ages 8 and 5. The fire occurred as the couple’s relationship was deteriorating.
Weisheit’s attorneys asked for permission to conduct more brain scans, citing his history of head injuries and mental health problems. Republican Gov. Mike Braun denied the request and also rejected appeals to commute the death sentence to life in prison.
His lawyers have separately questioned Indiana’s plan to use execution drugs obtained from a pharmacy that is due to face a disciplinary hearing before the state Pharmacy Board next week. The Indiana Department of Correction said it remains confident the execution can be carried out humanely.
The scheduled executions come as lethal-injection procedures face renewed scrutiny. In September, a planned execution in Tennessee failed when death row prisoner Christa Pike survived two doses of pentobarbital and was taken to a hospital. She has since returned to prison.
