The United States will execute five prisoners in one week – Grupo Milenio

It is expected that Five inmates sentenced to death in the United States are to be executed within a week in the same number of states, an unusually high number that defies a years-long trend of decline in both use and support for capital punishment in the country.

This would be the first time since 2003 that five executions have been carried out in seven days, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, a nonprofit organization that does not have a position on capital punishment but is critical of the way states carry it out. The sentences are scheduled for Alabama, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Texas.

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The first execution was carried out on Friday in South Carolinaand if the other four scheduled for this week go forward, the United States will have reached 1,600 since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, said Robin Maher, the center’s executive director.

“Two in one day is unusual, and four in two days in the same week is also very unusual,” Maher said.

Here are more details about the five executions planned in one week:

How were they programmed?

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Experts say the fact that five executions are scheduled for one week is simply an anomaly because courts or officials in each state set dates at almost the same time after the The inmates exhausted their appeals.

“I don’t know of any reason other than coincidence,” said Eric Berger, a law professor at the University of Nebraska, death penalty expert.

Berger said some factors can cause executions to pile up, such as the a state’s inability to obtain necessary drugs to carry them out, as happened in South Carolina, or a resulting moratorium on botched executions, as happened in Oklahoma.

South Carolina

The first of five was on Friday, when South Carolina executed Freddie Owens for the 1997 murder of a convenience store clerk during a robbery.

It was the first execution in South Carolina in 13 years, an involuntary delay caused by state prison officials’ inability to obtain the drugs needed for lethal injections. To carry them out, the state switched from a three-drug method to A new protocol for the use of a single sedative, pentobarbital.

Alabama

Alabama is set to carry out the country’s second execution on Thursday with nitrogen gasIn January, it became the first state to use the new procedure, which involves placing a mask on an inmate and forcing him to inhale pure nitrogen.

Alan Miller, whose execution was stayed in 2002 because authorities were unable to connect an IV, was convicted of shooting dead three men he had worked within 1999.

Missouri, Oklahoma and Texas

Texas is scheduled to execute on Tuesday Travis Mullisa man with a long history of mental illness who repeatedly refused his right to appeal his death sentence. Mullis was convicted of kill his 3-month-old son in January 2008.

Also on Tuesday in Missouri, Marcellus Williams Williams is to be given a lethal injection for the 1998 stabbing death of a woman in University City, a St. Louis suburb. Williams’ attorneys argued Monday that the state Supreme Court should halt his execution over alleged procedural errors in jury selection and the prosecution’s alleged mishandling of the murder weapon.

But the state’s high court rejected those arguments, and Gov. Mike Parson denied Williams’ request for clemency, paving the way for proceed with your sentence.

In Oklahoma, Emmanuel Littlejohn will receive a lethal injection on Thursday for his role in the 1992 shooting death of a convenience store owner during a robbery. Littlejohn has admitted his role in the robbery but maintains he did not fire the fatal shot.

The state Board of Pardons and Paroles voted 3-2 last month to recommend Gov. Kevin Stitt spare Littlejohn’s life, but the governor still has not made a decision on clemency.

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