A Florida man convicted of murdering two women he hired for sex is to be put to death by lethal injection on Tuesday, one of four executions to be carried out in the United States this week.
Samuel Smithers, 72, was sentenced to death in 1999 for the 1996 killings of Christy Cowan and Denise Roach in Tampa. They had been beaten and strangled and their bodies were found in a pond.
Smithers is scheduled to be executed at a Florida state prison at 6:00 pm Eastern Time (2200 GMT), the 14th execution in the southern state this year.
Another convicted murderer is to be put to death by lethal injection in the midwestern state of Missouri on Tuesday.
Lance Shockley, 48, is to be executed at 6:00 pm Central Time (2300 GMT) for the 2005 murder of a police sergeant, Carl Graham.
Graham was gunned down in an ambush at his home. The officer had been investigating a fatal car accident involving Shockley at the time.
Shockley has maintained his innocence but his appeals have been rejected by numerous courts, including the Supreme Court. Missouri Governor Mike Kehoe rejected his clemency request on Monday.
Two other executions are scheduled this week.
Charles Crawford, 59, is to put to death by lethal injection in Mississippi on Wednesday for the 1994 rape and murder of Kristy Ray, a 20-year-old college student.
Richard Djerf, 55, is to be executed by lethal injection in Arizona on Friday for the brutal 1993 murders of four members of a Phoenix family.
In a letter last month apologizing for the crime, Djerf said he was ready to die and would not seek clemency.
“If I can’t find reason to spare my life, what reason would anyone else have?” he wrote.
There have been 35 executions in the United States this year, equaling the number of inmates that were put to death in 2014.
Florida has carried out the most executions with 13, followed by Texas with five and South Carolina and Alabama with four.
Twenty-nine of this year’s executions have been carried out by lethal injection, two by firing squad and four by nitrogen hypoxia, which involves pumping nitrogen gas into a face mask, causing the prisoner to suffocate.
The use of nitrogen gas as a method of capital punishment has been denounced by United Nations experts as cruel and inhumane.
The death penalty has been abolished in 23 of the 50 US states, while three others — California, Oregon and Pennsylvania — have moratoriums in place.
President Donald Trump is a proponent of capital punishment and, on his first day in office, called for an expansion of its use “for the vilest crimes.”
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