A look at the status of US executions in 2025
By ADRIAN SAINZ
Associated Press
Twenty-one men have died by court-ordered execution so far this year in the U.S., and nine other people are scheduled to be put to death in seven states during the remainder of 2025.
Two men were executed Tuesday evening in Florida and in Alabama. An Oklahoma man is scheduled to be put to death Thursday after an appeals court on Wednesday lifted a temporary stay of execution issued earlier by a district court.
Another man is scheduled to be put to death in South Carolina on Friday, after a federal judge ruled that the man's lawyers didn’t have evidence there were problems with the state’s lethal injection process.
States with scheduled executions this year are Florida, Mississippi, Ohio, Tennessee and Texas, though Ohio’s governor has routinely postponed the actions as the dates near.
A look at recent executions and those scheduled for the rest of the year, by state:
Anthony Wainwright, 54, died by lethal injection Tuesday for the kidnapping, rape and murder of Carmen Gayheart in 1994. Gayheart was abducted from a grocery store parking lot with another man in Lake City, Florida.
Thomas Lee Gudinas, 51, is set to die by lethal injection June 24. Gudinas was convicted in 1995 and sentenced to death for raping and killing Michelle McGrath near a bar. He would be the seventh person to be executed in Florida this year.
Gregory Hunt, 65, died by nitrogen gas Tuesday for the 1988 beating death of Karen Lane. She was found dead in an apartment in Cordova. Hunt had been dating Lane for about a month.
Alabama last year became the first state to carry out an execution with nitrogen gas. Nitrogen has now been used in five executions — four in Alabama and one in Louisiana. The method involves using a gas mask to force a person to breathe pure nitrogen gas, depriving them of the oxygen needed to stay alive.
John Fitzgerald Hanson, 61, is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection Thursday for killing a Tulsa woman in 1999.
A judge temporarily delayed the execution on Monday after Hanson’s lawyers argued that he did not receive a fair clemency hearing last month before the state’s Pardon and Parole Board. They claimed board member Sean Malloy was biased because he worked for the district attorney’s office when Hanson was being prosecuted.
Malloy has said he never worked on Hanson’s case at the time and was unfamiliar with it before the clemency hearing. Malloy was one of three members who voted 3-2 to deny Hanson a clemency recommendation.
On Wednesday, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals ordered that the stay be lifted. The appeals court wrote that the district judge didn’t have the authority to issue the stay.
Hanson was transferred to Oklahoma custody in March by federal officials following through on President Donald Trump’s sweeping executive order to more actively support the death penalty.
Stephen Stanko is scheduled to be executed on Friday for killing his 74-year-old friend Henry Turner in April 2006.
Stanko, 57, is also on death row for killing a woman he was living with and raping her teenage daughter.
Stanko chose to die by lethal injection instead of in the electric chair or by firing squad.
Mikal Mahdi was executed by firing squad in South Carolina on April 11. Mahdi’s lawyers released autopsy results that show the shots that killed him barely hit his heart and suggested he was in agonizing pain for three or four times longer than experts say he would have been if his heart had been hit directly.
The state Supreme Court rejected a request from Stanko’s lawyers to delay his execution so they could get more information about the death of Mahdi. A doctor hired by the defense said Mahdi suffered a lingering death of about 45 seconds to a minute because his heart was not destroyed as planned.
On Wednesday, a federal judge allowed the execution to go on despite arguments from Stanko's lawyers that inmates in the past three lethal injection executions died a lingering death — still conscious as they felt like they were drowning when fluid rushed into their lungs.
Stanko’s execution would be the 23rd in 2025. All of 2024 saw 25 executions, matching the number for 2018. Those were the highest totals since 28 executions in 2015.
Mississippi’s longest-serving death row inmate is set to be executed on June 25.
Richard Gerald Jordan, 78, was sentenced to death in 1976 for kidnapping and killing a woman in a forest. Jordan has filed multiple death sentence appeals, which have been denied.
Mississippi allows death sentences to be carried out using lethal injection, nitrogen gas, electrocution or firing squad.
Byron Black, 69, is scheduled to die by lethal injection on Aug. 5. Black was convicted in 1989 of three counts of first-degree murder for the shooting deaths of his girlfriend, Angela Clay, and her two daughters.
Harold Nichols, 64, is also scheduled to die by lethal injection on Dec. 11. Nichols was convicted of rape and first-degree felony murder in the 1988 death of Karen Pulley in Hamilton County.
Oscar Smith died by lethal injection in Tennessee on May 22. Smith, 75, was convicted of fatally stabbing and shooting his estranged wife and her two teenage sons at their Nashville home in 1989.
Smith was the first person to be executed in the state since the Tennessee Department of Correction issued a new execution protocol in late December that uses the single drug pentobarbital.
Blaine Milam, 35, is scheduled to die by lethal injection on Sept. 25. Milam was convicted of killing his girlfriend’s 13-month-old daughter during what the couple had said was part of an “exorcism” in Rusk County in East Texas in December 2008.
Milam’s girlfriend, Jesseca Carson, was also convicted of capital murder and sentenced to life in prison without parole.
Ohio has two executions set for later this year, with Timothy Coleman scheduled to die on Oct. 30 and Kareem Jackson scheduled to be executed on Dec. 10.
However, Republican Gov. Mike DeWine already has postponed into 2028 three executions that were scheduled for June, July and August of this year. DeWine has said that he does not anticipate any further executions will happen during his term, which runs through 2026.
Associated Press reporters Jeffrey Collins in Columbia, South Carolina, and Sean Murphy in Oklahoma City contributed.
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