Three executions in a single day—in Indiana, Alabama and Florida—as Democrats remain silent

6 November 2026facebook iconThree men were put to death in the United States on Thursday, November 5, as Indiana, Alabama and Florida carried out executions within 18 hours of each other. Indiana killed Jeffrey Weisheit shortly after midnight; that evening, Florida and Alabama killed Jesse Guardado and Michael Shannon Taylor within an hour of each other. All three died by lethal injection.

The state killings Thursday come five weeks after Tennessee’s failed execution of Christa Pike, which has left her in prison isolation in constant pain, and a month since Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced the firing squad execution of the Fort Hood shooter, Nidal Hasan, set for next month.

It was the second time this year that three people were executed on a single day in America. The first came on August 13, in Tennessee, Oklahoma and Alabama. Before that, it had not happened since January 7, 2010.

The three state killings came just two days after the Democrats’ sweeping victory in the November 3 midterm elections, which constituted a stunning repudiation of Trump’s policies on social inequality, war, the assault on immigrants and attacks on democratic rights. Yet a wide internet search turns up not a single comment from any Democrat on Thursday’s three executions.

Instead, the Democrats have responded to their victory by offering to collaborate with the administration in its reactionary policies. Their stance on capital punishment is not a recent change. In 2024 the party dropped abolition of capital punishment from its platform for the first time in over a decade. But even before that, Democratic presidents from Clinton to Obama defended the use of state killings against offenders who have carried out the most “heinous” crimes.

Three active death-penalty states—Georgia, Nevada and Texas—elected Democratic governors on Tuesday, replacing Republicans. None has said they will work to abolish the death penalty. Their focus is not on the anti-democratic and barbaric character of capital punishment, but on the inequities in its application, the rights of victims of violent crime and their duty to uphold state law.

In Georgia, Governor-elect Keisha Lance Bottoms, the former mayor of Atlanta, has said little about capital punishment as such. Her statements on capital crimes have centered on violent crime and the grief of victims’ families.

Nevada Governor-elect Aaron Ford, the state’s outgoing attorney general, has said he opposes the death penalty and would sign a repeal bill if the state legislature passed one. But he has made clear that his personal opposition will not stand in the way of executions: “My job has to be to enforce the law as written ... I have a duty to the State of Nevada to do the job I was elected to do, which is to uphold the law.”

In Texas, which has carried out more executions than any other state since capital punishment was reinstated, Governor-elect Gina Hinojosa told CNN, “The death penalty is the law of the land in Texas, and as governor, my sworn duty is to uphold and execute the law faithfully.” Where innocence or due process is in question, she pledged only “the highest standard of constitutional scrutiny.”

On the same day as the three executions, California Governor Gavin Newsom, widely seen as a contender for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028, moved to commute the death sentences of all 548 people on the state’s death row to life without parole. Of these, 382 require approval from the California Supreme Court.

In an open letter, Newsom declared, “I take this action because I firmly believe that state-sanctioned killing is incompatible with California’s values, undermines the foundations of our legal system, and diminishes each of us.” He called the state’s system “a failure” by every measure, one that “has resulted in the conviction of innocent people.”

The commutations will spare hundreds of lives, but the timing of the action marks it as a cynical move to boost Newsom’s “progressive” credentials ahead of a presidential run. California has been under a moratorium on executions that Newsom himself imposed in 2019. If the state’s death penalty system has been “a failure” by every measure, why did he wait seven years—until after the midterms and barely two months before he leaves office—to act? Notably, he made no mention of the three men being put to death that day in other states.

Alabama Governor Kay Ivey, a Republican, seized on the announcement after Taylor’s execution. “California may let their criminals escape justice, but not Alabama,” she said. “Here, we enforce the law and always will.”

Jeffrey Weisheit, 50, was pronounced dead at 12:45 a.m. CST at Indiana State Prison in Michigan City. It was Indiana’s fourth execution since the state ended a 15-year pause in December 2024.

Weisheit was sentenced to death in 2013 for the 2010 killings of his girlfriend’s children, 8-year-old Alyssa and 5-year-old Caleb, in a fire he set in a house near Evansville. His attorneys argued that evidence of brain injuries, mental illness and childhood trauma never reached his jury, and the state refused to cooperate in conducting brain scans. Republican Governor Mike Braun denied clemency on November 2.

The children’s father, Steven Lynch, opposed the execution. In a sworn statement supporting clemency, he asked, “What good does it do the memory of my children to put this man to death?” He addressed Weisheit directly: “Jeffrey, I forgive you.” The children’s mother, Lisa Lynch, supported the death sentence.

Indiana paid $275,000 for the pentobarbital used to kill Weisheit. The supplier, his attorneys said, was Pharmaneek, an Indianapolis pharmacy on probation and facing possible suspension after failed inspections for “expired medications” and “inadequate temperature monitoring.” A defense filing alleged the pharmacy gave $5,000 to the campaign of Republican Attorney General Todd Rokita in June while on probation. The Indiana Supreme Court refused a stay by a 3-2 vote.

The killing itself was hidden from view. The blinds into the death chamber opened at 12:34 a.m., with Weisheit already strapped to the gurney, and closed three minutes later—eight minutes before the official time of death. “They don’t want anyone to see what they do,” defense attorney Joseph Perkovich said. “I’m stunned.”

Two Republican legislators who had pressed for greater transparency in Indiana’s executions were both defeated in Tuesday’s election.

Michael Shannon Taylor, 54, was pronounced dead at 6:10 p.m. CST at Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore, Alabama’s third execution of the year. In November 1991, at age 19 and absent without leave from the Navy, he beat Ivan Moore, 83, and Lucille Moore, 79, to death with a metal bar during a robbery of their Gadsden home. He had no criminal record and confessed.

His jury never heard key mitigating evidence. His court-appointed lawyer, who had never tried a capital case, told jurors his client was “1000 percent” guilty and that “there’s nothing that mitigates the crime.” Counsel claimed Taylor had “no mental problems” without investigating a family history of mental illness, alcoholism and physical abuse. Death sentences for 18- to 20-year-olds have since virtually vanished, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Taylor was the seventh military veteran executed this year.

Alabama obtained his death warrant on the premise that he would be killed by nitrogen asphyxiation, the method he had selected years earlier. After a federal court ruled the state’s nitrogen protocol unconstitutional, Alabama switched to lethal injection, a method Taylor never chose. A judge rejected his objection.

Can you explain how the US death penalty system developed historically, including when and why executions were reinstated after being halted in the 1970s?How does the abuse suffered by boys at institutions like the Dozier School for Boys connect to broader patterns of how the capitalist state treats poor and working-class children through foster care, juvenile detention and prisons?Ask more questions at SocialismAI.comAccording to a Montgomery Advertiser reporter, a corrections officer called out “Mr. Taylor,” swept a finger beneath his eyelashes and pinched his arm to check for consciousness. Taylor’s feet then curled inward, toes straining toward his chest, and his eyes appeared to roll back into his head. Ivey said afterward that Taylor “is facing the Good Lord for final judgement tonight.”

Jesse Guardado, 64, was pronounced dead at 6:13 p.m. EST at Florida State Prison near Starke. His was Florida’s 19th execution this year, tying the record the state set in 2025, and the 46th carried out under Republican Governor Ron DeSantis. He was at least the 11th survivor of the state-run Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys to be executed by Florida.

His life was shaped by abuse from early childhood, much of it at the hands of the state. His father died by suicide when he was 3; neglect, sexual abuse and early exposure to drugs followed. As a teenager in the 1970s, he was sent to Dozier in Marianna. There, guards forced boys to fight one another and bet on the outcomes. Guardado was made to work in the school’s slaughterhouse, was beaten while handcuffed and shackled, and was raped by a guard. His cottage master carried a bullwhip.

Boys sent “up on the hill” for punishment were strapped down and locked in a small room overnight or through a weekend. “It was solitary confinement plus restraints,” Guardado recalled, “and you’d be black and blue from all the beatings.”

Dozier was closed in 2011 amid a federal investigation into the deaths of at least 98 boys. Fifty-five bodies were later recovered from unmarked graves on its grounds. The Florida legislature formally apologized to survivors in 2017, and in 2024 DeSantis signed legislation compensating them—a mere $21,000 a piece. The Marshall Project has identified at least 34 boys sent to Dozier who ended up on Florida’s death row.

Guardado’s trauma fed a cycle of addiction and incarceration. In September 2004, at the end of a two-week crack cocaine binge, he killed 75-year-old Jackie Malone, a Walton County friend who had helped him with housing, money and a job after his earlier release from prison. Wracked with guilt, he confessed, asking an officer in the patrol car to shoot him. He waived a lawyer and pleaded guilty 25 days after his arrest. His jury never heard about his childhood or time at Dozier before sentencing him to death.

Guardado never contested his guilt, and his final appeals targeted Florida’s clemency process. No one on the state’s death row has received clemency since 1983, and DeSantis has said he will not grant it to anyone convicted of murder. Guardado learned his clemency proceedings had ended only when DeSantis signed his death warrant on October 5. His attorneys told the US Supreme Court that in Florida “there is no due process when ... the coin flipped says denied on both sides.” The court denied a stay without comment Thursday afternoon.

When state records showed Florida had used expired lethal injection drugs last year, officials declared the entries mistakes and corrected the logs with Wite-Out correction fluid.

Strapped to the gurney, Guardado said, “I would like to once again apologize for the pain and suffering I’ve caused to the victim’s family and my own family as well.” About a minute after the drugs began flowing, he began breathing heavily, followed by sputtering and twitching. His mother, now 90, lived to see the state kill her son.

Florida has now carried out 19 of the 35 executions in the US this year, more than half the national total. Two more are scheduled before DeSantis leaves office in January, either of which would set a new state record: Thomas Overton on November 19 and Ricardo Gonzalez on December 1. Overton is also a Dozier survivor. If his execution goes forward, the state that has formally apologized for torturing these men as children will have put two of them to death in the space of two weeks.