Florida accounts for more than half of 32 U.S. executions this year
Jeffrey Weisheit was pronounced dead at 12:45 a.m. Thursday at the state prison in Michigan City, according to Noelle Russell, a Department of Correction spokesperson. His was the first of three lethal injections scheduled for the same day in the United States. Florida and Alabama planned to execute Jesse Guardado and Michael Taylor later Thursday, just hours after Weisheit’s death, for killing older adults during home robberies.
Florida’s scheduled execution of Guardado would be the state’s 19th this year under Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, matching the record Florida set in 2025. It would also be the second time this year that three people were put to death on the same day in the United States.
Florida has carried out more than half of the 32 executions in the United States so far this year. DeSantis, who leaves office in January, has said he wants to bring justice to families who have waited decades for death sentences to be carried out.
The death penalty has faced renewed scrutiny since September, when Tennessee’s attempt to execute Christa Pike failed and Pike survived two doses of pentobarbital. Courts have rejected efforts to halt other executions since then.
Russell said Weisheit’s final meal was barbecue ribs and that he had no final words.
Weisheit, 50, had acknowledged killing his girlfriend’s two children in a house fire in the Evansville area in 2010. He had hoped that Republican Gov. Mike Braun would grant clemency and change his sentence to life in prison. Braun declined.
Lawyers also failed to persuade Braun to allow Weisheit to undergo brain scans in an effort to reinforce their argument that his history of head injuries and mental health problems should foreclose execution.
Weisheit’s last objection centered on the state’s planned use of lethal drugs purchased from a pharmacy facing a disciplinary hearing next week at the Indiana Pharmacy Board.
Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita said 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.”
Guardado, 64, confessed and quickly pleaded guilty to 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. The woman had helped him get a job and housing. A federal appeals court said in 2024 that Guardado had received a “full and fair” hearing during the death penalty phase of his case.
In 1991, Michael Taylor, then 19, fatally beat two people, ages 83 and 79, with a metal bar during a robbery in their Gadsden, Alabama, home. Police arrested him with the victims’ Cadillac an hour away in Birmingham.
Death penalty opponents had urged Republican Gov. Kay Ivey to reduce Taylor’s sentence to life in prison, noting his age and immaturity at the time of the killings. Ivey declined.
“If the state kills Michael, it is not the 19-year-old who made the worst mistake of his life who it kills. But the mature, well-respected, God-fearing man sitting in that cell today,” said Esther Brown of Project Hope to Abolish the Death Penalty.
Alabama planned to execute Taylor, 54, by lethal injection after a judge declared a nitrogen gas method unconstitutional. Taylor’s attorneys objected to the last-minute switch because he had selected nitrogen gas as his method several years ago, but a judge ruled against him.