Florida and Alabama plan to execute two men Thursday for killing older adults during home robberies, just hours after Indiana put a prisoner to death in the first of three lethal injections scheduled for the same day in the U.S.
Mike Braun would grant clemency and change his sentence to life in prison. Braun declined. Police arrested him with the victims’ Cadillac an hour away in Birmingham. Death penalty opponents had urged Republican Gov. Kay Ivey to reduce Taylor’s sentence to life in prison, noting his age and immaturity at the time of the killings. She declined. His attorneys objected to the last-minute switch to lethal injection since he selected nitrogen gas as his method several years ago, but a judge ruled against Taylor. Lawyers had asked for a life sentence for Weisheit Weisheit’s last objection centred on the state’s planned use of lethal drugs purchased from a pharmacy that is facing a disciplinary hearing next week at the Indiana Pharmacy Board.
He had acknowledged killing his girlfriend’s two children in a house fire in the Evansville area in 2010 but had hoped that Gov. In 1991, Michael Taylor, then 19, fatally beat two people, ages 83 and 79, with a metal bar during a robbery in their Gadsden, Alabama, home. The state plans to execute Taylor, 54, by lethal injection after a judge declared a nitrogen gas method unconstitutional.
She said Weisheit’s final meal was barbecue ribs and he had no final words. The execution provided “long-awaited justice for Alyssa Lynch and her brother Caleb, two innocent children whose lives were stolen in an act of unspeakable cruelty,” Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita said.
A federal appeals court in 2024 said that Guardado, now 64, had received a “full and fair” hearing during the death penalty phase of his case.
