3 men set for lethal injection on same day in Tennessee, Alabama and Oklahoma
By Josie Calloway ·
I don't know what the architects of American justice are thinking these days, but it ain't about doing right. It’s about spectacle.
The State’s Favorite Way to Make a Spectacle Out of Suffering
I don't know what the architects of American justice are thinking these days, but it ain't about doing right. It’s about spectacle. It’s about making an annual carnival out of human suffering for public consumption. Three men—Anthony Darrell Hines in Tennessee for a 1985 murder; Jeremy Williams in Alabama for the rape and murder of five-year-old Kamarie Holland; and Carlos Cuesta-Rodriguez in Oklahoma for shooting his girlfriend in 2003—are scheduled for lethal injection on August 13, 2026. The Associated Press reported this week that it would be the first time three executions were set for the same day since 2010.
When Justice Becomes a Factory Output
The numbers are staggering, and they tell a story of industrial-scale cruelty. By 2025, Florida was already leading the charge with 31 deaths from the start of the year, accounting for about 40% of all executions across 11 states that year, according to BBC reporting. The death penalty isn't just being used; it’s being streamlined. As Al Jazeera noted, Donald Trump re-instated the death penalty in 2025, and the Department of Justice reportedly "streamline[d] internal processes to expedite death penalty cases." This whole apparatus—the rush of executions, the lowering of legal thresholds (like Florida reducing required jurors from twelve to eight), the desperate attempts at lethal injections that fail, as seen with Tony Von Carruthers in Tennessee—it’s not about justice. It's a system designed for throughput. The quietest patient is always the one who gets ignored until they are deemed disposable.
The Architecture of Systematic Elimination
What these states are doing isn't governance; it's organized violence. When you look at how a governing structure systematically organizes and executes lethal force against specific groups—whether defined by perceived threat, class, or ethnicity—the mechanism is chillingly familiar. It reminds me of the Rwandan genocide. The shared process is that state-sanctioned terror becomes normalized, where neighbors are armed to kill their own community members based on a manufactured "threat."
The difference between a modern death row and the militias in Rwanda is just the veneer of law. Both require an infrastructure—a bureaucracy, a legal framework, a public performance—to make mass killing seem orderly and necessary. The state doesn't care about rehabilitation; it cares about maintaining its perceived social order by eliminating dissent or deviance.
The American system has forgotten that true civilization is built on the promise of life, not the threat of death. It’s time to look past the sensational details—the heinous nature of the crimes—and see only the pattern: a governing structure preparing for an organized purge.
This whole charade confirms that the justice system does not function as a mechanism for moral accountability; it functions as a state-run slaughterhouse, where the law is merely the paperwork required to make mass killing seem orderly and necessary.