Alabama plans lethal injection for Taylor after judge rejects nitrogen method
Alabama planned to execute Michael Taylor, 54, by lethal injection on Thursday after a judge declared a nitrogen gas method unconstitutional. Taylor’s attorneys objected to the last-minute switch to lethal injection because he had selected nitrogen gas as his method several years ago, but a judge ruled against Taylor.
Alabama executed Kenneth Smith in 2024 by nitrogen asphyxiation, in an episode that witnesses found excruciating. The state had previously failed to succeed in its attempt to kill Smith using lethal injection.
Taylor’s scheduled execution was one of three lethal injections set for the same day in the United States. Indiana put Jeffrey Weisheit, 50, to death at 12.45am Thursday 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. It was the second time this year that three people were scheduled to 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 Pike survived two massive doses of pentobarbital.
Weisheit 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. Earlier on Thursday, lawyers failed to persuade the governor to allow Weisheit to undergo brain scans to assess a history of head injuries and mental health problems, and 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 facing a disciplinary hearing next week before 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.
Florida planned to execute Jesse Guardado, 64, later on Thursday, in what would be the state’s 19th execution of 2026 under Republican governor Ron DeSantis, matching a record set by the state in 2025. Florida has carried out more than half of the 32 executions in the US so far this year.
Guardado was 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. The woman had helped him get a job and housing. Guardado had a court appeal turned down.
In 1991, when he was 19, Taylor 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.”