Florida and Alabama plan to execute one man each on Thursday just hours after Indiana put a prisoner to death – in the first of three lethal injections scheduled for the same day in the US.

It would be Florida’s 19th execution this year under Republican governor Ron DeSantis, matching a record set by the state in 2025, and the second time this year that three people would be put to death on the same day.

The death penalty in the US has faced renewed scrutiny since the September failed execution of Christa Pike in Tennessee, although courts have rejected efforts to halt other executions after she survived two massive doses of pentobarbital.

In Indiana on Thursday, Jeffrey Weisheit, 50, was pronounced dead at 12.45am at the state prison in Michigan City, said Noelle Russell, spokesperson at the state’s department of correction.

She said he had no final words. He had acknowledged killing his girlfriend’s two children in a house fire in the Evansville area in 2010 but had hoped that governor Mike Braun would grant clemency and change his sentence to life in prison. Braun declined.

Florida has carried out more than half the 32 executions in the US so far this year.

Jesse Guardado is set for execution later on Thursday after being convicted of fatally stabbing a 75-year-old woman inside her Walton county home in 2004 before stealing her jewelry box, $80 and other valuables to buy drugs. She had helped him get a job and housing. Guardado, now 64, had a court appeal turned down.

In Alabama, Michael Taylor is set to die by lethal injection on Thursday. In 1991, when he was 19, he beat two people, aged 83 and 79, to death with a metal bar during a robbery in their home in Gadsden.

Death penalty opponents had urged Alabama’s Republican governor Kay Ivey to reduce Taylor’s sentence to life in prison, but she declined.

Esther Brown of Project Hope to Abolish the Death Penalty said: “If the state kills Michael, it is not the 19-year-old who made the worst mistake of his life whom it kills. But the mature, well-respected, God-fearing man sitting in that cell today.”

The state plans to execute Taylor, 54, by lethal injection after a judge declared a nitrogen gas method unconstitutional. His attorneys objected to the last-minute switch to lethal injection since he selected nitrogen gas as his method several years ago, but a judge ruled against Taylor.

Alabama executed murderer Kenneth Smith in 2024 by nitrogen asphyxiation, in an episode that witnesses found excruciating, after previously failing to succeed in its attempt to kill him using lethal injection.

Meanwhile, in Indiana earlier on Thursday, lawyers failed to persuade the state governor to allow Weisheit to undergo brain scans to assess a history of head injuries and mental health problems. They had asked for a life sentence.

Weisheit’s last objection centered on the state’s planned use of lethal drugs purchased from a pharmacy that is facing a disciplinary hearing next week in front of the Indiana pharmacy board, the state regulatory agency.

The execution provided “long-awaited justice for Alyssa Lynch and her brother Caleb, two innocent children whose lives were stolen in an act of unspeakable cruelty”, Indiana attorney general Todd Rokita said.

The Associated Press contributed reporting