Four people across four states are set to be executed this week as the number of people put to death in the US continues to rise, reports CNN.
If all four are executed, as well as another two that are scheduled for June, the total number of executions in the US in the first six months of 2025 will be the same as the total number of executions throughout 2024.
“This is a dark time in US capital punishment,” the Deputy director at Reprieve US, Matt Wells, told CNN. “The dominant method of execution, lethal injection, is completely broken. Yet through his executive order on the death penalty, President Trump has sent a strong signal to states to push forward with executions.
We’re seeing states like Tennessee and Arizona, that stopped executions because so many went wrong, rushing to resume without having learned any lessons. Florida is on course to execute more people this year than ever in the modern era.
Given a political incentive to execute more people, but no way to legitimately acquire drugs for lethal injection because of the healthcare industry’s unanimous opposition, states are spending insane sums on drugs on the black market, switching to other equally abhorrent forms of human experimentation like nitrogen gas, or to bloody forms of state violence like the firing squad that the US abandoned long ago.
Meanwhile, the secrecy surrounding capital punishment is becoming ever-more pervasive. States have spent forty years pushing the lie that it is possible to execute people humanely and they know that when the curtain is pulled back and people see lethal injection for what it really is, they are horrified. A policy that cannot survive public scrutiny should not exist.”