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Three inmates in three different states are scheduled to be executed this week amid an uptick in the use of the death penalty nationwide.
Gregory Hunt, 65, is scheduled to die by nitrogen gas in Alabama on Tuesday.
Hunt was convicted of beating a Cordova woman, Karen Lane, to death in 1988. Court records show Hunt had been dating Lane for roughly a month before he killed her.
An execution for Anthony Wainwright, a 54-year-old Florida inmate, is also set for Tuesday. Wainwright is scheduled to die by lethal injection for crimes he committed in 1994.
He kidnapped a woman named Carmen Gayheart from a supermarket parking lot in Lake City and raped and killed her.
Stephen Stanko, 57, is scheduled to die by lethal injection in South Carolina on Friday. He was convicted of murdering his friend Henry Turner, 74, in 2006.
Hours before killing Turner, he beat and strangled his girlfriend and raped her teen daughter before cutting her throat. The daughter survived the horrific attack and went on to testify against him in court.
John Fitzgerald Hanson, 61, was set to die by lethal injection on Thursday. Hanson was convicted of killing an elderly Tulsa woman, Mary Bowles, in 1999.
He was transferred to Oklahoma by Attorney General Pam Bondi in February to be put to death. Hanson’s expedited transfer was part of the Trump administration’s move to more actively support the death penalty.
But on Monday, Hanson was granted a temporary stay of the execution, meaning his scheduled capital punishment has been put on hold. His lawyers argue that he did not get a fair clemency hearing in May.
The planned executions are part of an overall increase in the use of the death penalty in the U.S. since January, according to CBS News.
The non-profit Death Penalty Information Center says 19 inmates in nine states have been executed in the U.S. this year. Of those executions, five have been in Florida, four in Texas, three in South Carolina and two in Alabama.
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