Three states are planning to carry out a rare triple execution this week on Nov. 5.
Indiana is set to execute Jeffrey Weisheit, 50, by lethal injection for the 2010 murders of his girlfriend's two children, 8-year-old Alyssa Lynch and her 5-year-old brother, Caleb. The children were burned alive in their home.
Weisheit's attorneys are asking Gov. Mike Braun to pause his and all other executions in the state because of Christa Pike's botched lethal injection in Tennessee. Indiana uses the same single drug, pentobarbital, as Tennessee does for its executions.
Also Thursday, Alabama is set to execute Michael Shannon Taylor, 55, by lethal injection for the 1991 beating deaths of an elderly couple. Taylor repeatedly used an iron bar to hit 83-year-old
Ivan Moore and 79-year-old Lucille Moore before stealing their wallets and car and going on a shopping spree.
The other state putting an inmate to death on Thursday is Florida, which is set to execute Jesse Guardado, 64, by lethal injection for the 2004 stabbing and beating death of a 75-year-old community activist named Jackie Malone.
Three executions in one day is an extremely rare occurrence. Death penalty observers say that double or triple executions are purely coincidental timing, borne out of scheduling that just happened to fall on the same day across all three states.
Though sometimes two executions are held on the same day in the U.S., most of the time it's one. Death penalty observers say that double or triple executions are purely coincidental timing.
If all three executions are carried out as planned, it will be the first triple execution in the U.S. since Aug. 13, when Alabama, Tennessee and Oklahoma all executed death row inmates. Before that, it had been 16 years since the U.S. saw a triple execution.
The two triple executions this year reflect an overall uptick in the death penalty since the beginning of 2025, a pattern that experts attribute to the political climate under President Donald Trump and Florida's recent state record-breaking execution pace. Since January 2025, 11 states have put 79 inmates to death. That's more than any other two-year period in well over a decade.
Here's what you need to know about each execution this week and what kind of fight each inmate is putting up as they approach their last hours alive.
Indiana to execute Jeffrey Weisheit for horrific murder of 2 children
On April 9, 2010, Lisa Lynch left her two children at their home in Evansville, Indiana, with her live-in boyfriend, Jeffrey Weisheit, while she worked an overnight shift. At some point, court records say that Weisheit became enraged at 5-year-old Caleb Lynch, duct taped the boy's hands behind his back, shoved a rag in his mouth and set the home on fire.
As Weisheit fled the scene, officers responded to the house fire, and found both Caleb's body and that of his 8-year-old sister, Alyssa Lynch. They found that road flares had been set under and around Caleb, while Alyssa died in a closet, either because she had fled there or was trapped. Both had horrific burns and died of smoke inhalation, their autopsies showed.
"There is no justification for the evil that was unleashed on my two children," Lynch said just after Weisheit was sentenced to death in 2013, according to an archived story in the Evansville Courier & Press, part of the USA TODAY Network. "There is not a second that goes by that I don't miss my children and think about the memories we could have built."
While Caleb's and Alyssa's birth father has forgiven Weisheit and asked Indiana Gov. Mike Braun to stop the execution, Lynch recently urged the Indiana Parole Board to uphold the death sentence, saying her children's murders robbed them of their future and her of watching them grow up, the Courier & Press reported.
The board interviewed Weisheit in prison on Oct. 16. During the interview, Weisheit acknowledged setting the fire but struggled to explain why anger his toward Lynch led him to kill the children. “There is no excuse or explanation for what I did,” he said, according to the Indiana Capital Chronicle.
Weisheit's attorneys recently asked Braun to stop all executions in the state, citing Christa Pike's botched lethal injection on Sept. 30 and Tony Carruthers' in May. Joseph Perkovitch, one of Weisheit's attorneys, said there are "glaring" and "unmistakable" questions regarding pentobarbital, the drug that Indiana uses and the same the drug used in the two botched executions.
On Nov. 2, Perkovitch revealed that Indiana bought its pentobarbital from a pharmacy the state is actively investigating and has placed on probation for drug contamination, reported IndyStar, part of the USA TODAY Network.
"It is alarming that the state purchased these drugs from a pharmacy it is trying to shut down due to major safety issues in the storage and management of drugs," Perkovich said in a statement.
Both the Indiana Department of Correction and the Office of the Attorney General said in statements that they are confident that the state will carry out the execution in compliance with state law. They did not address IndyStar's questions about the supplier's past infractions. The governor's office has not responded to IndyStar's questions.
The parole board declined to recommend clemency for Weisheit to Braun last week. On Nov. 2, Braun announced that he would not intervene in the execution, which would be Indiana's first this year.
Alabama to execute Michael Shannon Taylor for elderly couple's murder
On Nov. 4, 1991, a 19-year-old Michael Shannon Taylor was absent without leave from the Navy when he decided to go back to his hometown of Gadsden, Alabama, to rob an elderly couple he knew: 79-year-old Lucille Moore and her husband, 83-year-old Ivan Moore.
Taylor got into their home after he asked to use their telephone and attacked the couple with a metal bar, hitting them both repeatedly in the head shortly after Ivan Moore had offered him water and a donut, court records show.
Taylor stole the couple's valuables and their Cadillac, and then went on a shopping spree for clothes and jewelry, court records show.
Taylor's attorneys are arguing that he previously selected to be executed by nitrogen gas and that the state's new plan to put him to death by lethal injection violates his rights. The method change comes four months after a federal Alabama judge blocked the state from using nitrogen gas, ruling that the method amounts to cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the U.S. Constitution.
Alabama was the first state in the nation to carry out a nitrogen gas execution, that of Kenneth Eugene Smith in 2024. The state executed six other inmates using the method, and Louisiana has used it once.
If Taylor's execution moves forward, he will be the third inmate put to death in Alabama this year.
Florida to execute Jesse Guardado for killing woman who helped him
On Sept. 13, 2004, Jesse Guardado was desperate for a crack cocaine and decided to target Jackie Malone, a 75-year-old community activist. Guardado had met Malone a year before when she helped him find a place to stay, get a job and gave him some money after his release from prison for armed robberies, according to court records.
"But none of that mattered to Guardado now," according to a court synopsis of the crime. "What did matter was that Ms. Malone lived in a secluded area. That she trusted him enough to open her home to him if he showed up in the middle of the night. That she had money. ... To get the money, all he had to do was kill her."
Guardado had a kitchen knife and a metal rod when he arrived at Malone's house in Defuniak Springs in Florida's Panhandle. Malone had been asleep but let Guardado in after he said he needed to use the phone.
Guardado used the rod to repeatedly hit Malone over the head, stabbed her five times in the chest and slashed her throat, court records say. Guardado stole Malone's jewelry, checkbook, purse, and cellphone, and fled. He later confessed to the murder and pleaded guilty
His attorneys and anti-death penalty activists in Florida have been arguing that he deserves mercy because of a horrific childhood filled with neglect, sexual abuse and exposure to drugs that led to a severe addiction.
A guard raped Guardado when he was in juvenile custody, and at the notorious Dozier School for Boys, he was beaten while shackled, witnessed sexual assaults, and feared staff would kill him, according to Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty.
"Although Jesse mentioned Dozier in his confession, his trial attorneys never investigated or presented his experiences there to the jury," the group wrote as part of its request for clemency on Guardado's behalf. "The people deciding whether he should live or die never heard this critical evidence. Clemency offers an opportunity to consider it now."
The group also says that Guardado deserves clemency because he has become a sober and faithful man in prison, and has always deeply regretted and apologized for killing Malone.
“I can offer no excuses for what I did, only my sincerest apologies and regrets," he wrote in a letter seeking clemency from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
DeSantis has never granted clemency to a death row inmate and has said that executions bring justice to victim families. No other Florida governor has overseen more executions in the modern death penalty era than DeSantis.
The Florida Supreme Court recently denied Guardado's request for a stay of execution, rejecting arguments from his attorneys that the state's clemency process is essentially meaningless because DeSantis has outright said that he will not grant clemency to people convicted of murder or felony sex offenses.
If Guardado's execution moves forward, he will become the 19th inmate put to death in the state this year, matching the state's one-year record, set in 2025. The state plans to execute at least two more inmates by the end of the year.
Contributing: Kristine Phillips, Indianapolis Star, and Sarah Clifton, the Montgomery Advertiser
Amanda Lee Myers is a senior crime and courts reporter who covers the death penalty, cold cases and breaking news for USA TODAY. Follow her on X at @amandaleeusat
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: 3 states to carry out rare triple execution this week
