Jeremy Williams was scheduled to face the death penalty in Tennessee on Thursday, putting him among three men set for execution in three different states on the same day. At 41, Williams was part of a rare timing that had not been seen in the US for 16 years.
The other men scheduled for Thursday were Anthony Darrell Hines in Tennessee and Carlos Cuesta-Rodriguez in Oklahoma. The cluster turned a routine capital case into a national marker of how often executions are happening again, and how quickly that pace has climbed.
The numbers show the shift. There were 47 executions across 11 states in 2025, up from 25 across the US in 2024, a jump of 88%. Just over halfway into 2026, 19 executions had already been carried out, and 12 of them were in Florida. About 40% of the deaths in 2025 were also in Florida, making the state the clearest driver of the broader rise.
Florida’s role is tied to a 2023 change that lowered the legal threshold for capital punishment from a unanimous 12 jurors to eight. That change has helped speed death sentences into executions at a time when juries and the American public have become more wary of the punishment, not less. The gap between that caution and the growing pace of executions is what makes the current run stand out.
That national turn did not happen by accident. Donald Trump ended a nearly two-decade moratorium on the federal death penalty in 2020 by ordering 13 executions over a six month period, then signed an executive order on the first day of his second term in 2025 that re-instated the death penalty. The Department of Justice later expanded execution protocols to include additional manners such as firing squad and readopted lethal injections, and said in April that it had streamlined internal processes to speed death penalty cases.
What remains unanswered in Williams’ case is the reason Tennessee scheduled his execution for Thursday and the crime that led him there. The timing is clear, but the specific path to that date is not. For now, Williams sits at the center of an unusually crowded execution day, one that shows how much faster capital punishment is moving again in the US.
