Two men on death row in the United States were executed on Tuesday, including Marcellus Williams, a 55-year-old Black man who maintained his innocence in a murder case that drew support from civil rights groups. Williams was sentenced to death for the 1998 killing of Felicia Gayle, a former newspaper reporter, in Missouri. The second execution was of 38-year-old Travis Mullis in Huntsville, Texas, who was convicted of stomping his three-month-old son, Alijah Mullis, to death in 2008.
These executions are part of an unusually high number of death sentences carried out this week, defying a yearslong trend of declining use and support of the death penalty in the US Inmates in five states are scheduled for execution within the span of one week.
The first execution took place in South Carolina on Friday, with Missouri and Texas carrying out the next two. Two more inmates in Alabama and Oklahoma are scheduled for execution this week. If completed, it will be the first time since July 2003 that five executions have occurred in one week.
According to the Death Penalty Information Center, this week’s executions could bring the US total to 1,600 since the death penalty was reinstated by the Supreme Court in 1976.
Experts say five executions being scheduled within one week is simply an anomaly that resulted from courts or elected officials in individual states setting dates around the same time after inmates exhausted their appeals, AP reported.