Three men will be executed on the same day as death penalties rise in US

It's been 16 years since three people were executed on the same day in the US, but on Thursday, three men convicted of murder in different US states will face the death penalty.

The planned executions of inmates Anthony Darrell Hines, 66, Jeremy Williams, 41, and Carlos Cuesta-Rodriguez, 71, in Tennessee, Alabama and Oklahoma, respectively, are indicative of a steep rise in executions across the US.

Last year, in 2025, there were more than four times as many people put to death as there were in 2021, even as juries, and the American public at large, became increasingly wary of its use.

So what's driving the increase and are the US public in step with the trend?

President Donald Trump has long been a major supporter of the death penalty, describing capital punishment as "an essential tool for deterring and punishing those who would commit the most heinous crimes and acts of lethal violence against American citizens".

In 2020, during his first term, he ended a nearly two-decade moratorium on the federal death penalty, by ordering 13 executions over a six month period.

While the moratorium returned under President Biden, on the first day of Trump's second term in 2025, he signed an executive order that re-instated the death penalty. No federal executions have been carried out since he signed it, however. In the US, both the federal government and local states authorities can order executions.

Under Trump's administration, the Department of Justice has also expanded protocols to include additional manners of execution, such as by firing squad, and readopted lethal injections. The agency said in April that it has also streamlined internal processes to expedite death penalty cases.