A look at the status of US executions in 2025
Nineteen 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.
Oscar Smith was executed by lethal injection on Thursday. Matthew Lee Johnson in Texas and Benjamin Ritchie in Indiana died of the same method on Tuesday.
Other states with scheduled executions this year are Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Ohio, Oklahoma and South Carolina, though Ohio’s governor has been routinely postponing the actions as their dates near.
So far this year, executions have been carried out in Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Indiana, Louisiana, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas.
A look at the recent executions and those scheduled for the rest of the year, by state:
Texas
Johnson was executed 13 years to the day of a May 20, 2012, attack on 76-year-old Nancy Harris, a great-grandmother and convenience store clerk who was splashed with lighter fluid and set on fire during a robbery in Garland, a northeast suburb of Dallas. Badly burned, she died days afterward. At trial, Johnson admitted to the attack and expressed remorse.
Indiana
Ritchie was executed Tuesday for the fatal shooting of Beech Grove Police Officer Bill Toney in September 2000. According to court records, Ritchie jumped out of a stolen van after a police pursuit. Toney was chasing him when Ritchie turned and shot him four times.
A jury convicted Ritchie of murder and other offenses in 2002. Ritchie unsuccessfully challenged the convictions at the state and federal level. His latest motion asked permission to raise arguments that his attorney was ineffective because the lawyer failed to investigate whether Ritchie suffered from fetal alcohol spectrum disorders as well as childhood lead exposure.
Tennessee
Smith, 75, was convicted of fatally stabbing and shooting his estranged wife and her two teenage sons at their Nashville home in 1989.
Smith has always said he is innocent, and in an interview with The Associated Press recently, he primarily wanted to discuss the ways he felt the court system had failed him.
Smith was within minutes of being executed in 2022 when Gov. Bill Lee issued a sudden reprieve. Smith’s attorney had requested the results of required purity and potency tests for the lethal injection drugs that were to be used on him. It turned out that a test was never done.
An independent review later found that none of the drugs prepared for the seven inmates executed in Tennessee since 2018 had been fully tested.
The Tennessee Department of Correction issued a new execution protocol in late December that will utilize the single drug pentobarbital, which was used in Smith’s execution.
Byron Black, 69, is scheduled to be executed 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 scheduled to be executed on Dec. 11. Nichols was convicted of rape and first-degree felony murder in the 1988 death of Karen Pulley in Hamilton County.
Florida
Anthony Wainwright, 54, is scheduled to die by lethal injection on June 10 for the kidnapping, rape and murder of Carmen Gayheart in 1994. Gayheart was abducted from a grocery store parking lot in Lake City, Florida.
Alabama
Gregory Hunt, 65, is scheduled to die by nitrogen gas on June 10 for the 1988 beating death of Karen Lane. She was found dead in an apartment in Cordova that she shared with another woman. Hunt had been dating Lane for about one month before her death, according to court records.
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.
Oklahoma
John Fitzgerald Hanson, 61, is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection on June 12.
An Oklahoma board has denied clemency for Hanson, who was convicted of killing a Tulsa woman in 1999.
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.
South Carolina
Stephen Stanko is scheduled to be executed June 13 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 will get to decide if he dies by firing squad, lethal injection or the electric chair. The deadline for his decision is May 30.
Stanko is the first person whose death has been scheduled in South Carolina’s since Mikal Mahdi was executed by firing squad 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.
Stanko’s execution would be the 23rd to take place in 2025, if the previously scheduled executions take place as planned. All of 2024 saw 25 executions, matching the number for 2018. Those were the highest totals since 28 executions in 2015.
Mississippi
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. Jordan has filed multiple death sentence appeals, the most recent of which was denied in October.
Mississippi Supreme Court records show Jordan kidnapped Edwina Marter and shot her to death in a forest in Harrison County. He then called her husband, falsely claimed she was safe and asked for $25,000.
Mississippi law allows death sentences to be carried out using lethal injection, nitrogen gas, electrocution or firing squad.
Ohio
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 has been routinely postponing the actions as their dates approach. He did so in February, when he postponed into 2028 three executions scheduled for June, July and August of this year. DeWine has said publicly that he does not anticipate any further executions will happen on his watch as governor, which runs through 2026.