Alabama executed Jeremy Williams on Thursday for the 2021 rape and murder of the young Georgia girl, ending his case hours after Tennessee and Oklahoma put inmates to death within 30 minutes of each other. Three men were executed by lethal injection in one day, the first time that has happened since 2010.
That is why Kamarie Holland is being searched now: her name sits inside a rare day in capital punishment history, one in which Alabama followed a string of executions that began in the morning and ended in the afternoon. The pace was notable even as the timing was described as a coincidence in scheduling, not a coordinated push, and it pushed the national total to 22 executions for 2025.
In Oklahoma, Carlos Cuesta-Rodriguez, 70, was executed at the state penitentiary in McAlester for murdering his girlfriend at their Oklahoma City home in 2003. He mouthed “I love you” to two relatives watching and left no final statement before being declared dead at 10:13 a.m. In Tennessee, Anthony Darrell Hines, 66, was executed for the 1985 stabbing death of Catherine Jean Jenkins in Kingston Springs. Asked for final words, he said, “not right now, thank you,” then added, “Tell my son hello,” before being pronounced dead at 10:43 a.m.
Those executions left one harsh fact hanging over the day: the system can move quickly when the schedule aligns, but it still leaves families with different kinds of endings. Dennis Jenkins, whose mother was killed by Hines, said she had only a plastic spray bottle to defend herself against the knife, and he said he hoped Hines felt severe pain for what he did. Alabama’s execution of Williams closed one more case, but it did not resolve the larger question of why 11 states have accounted for 47 executions in 2025 while nearly a dozen more are already scheduled.
The rare three-execution day will not stay rare for long if the pace continues. Florida has already executed two men in the same day in July and has put 31 people to death overall since the start of 2025. The sharper issue now is not whether the country can carry out executions in bunches, but how long the current surge can continue before the next state follows Alabama’s lead.
