66-year-old Brian Jennings, a former Marine, was executed yesterday in Florida for raping and killing six-year-old Rebecca Kunas in 1979.
In Oklahoma, Tremaine Wood, 46, convicted of the Jan. 1, 2002, slaying of Ronnie Weaf, 19, was also expected to be executed by lethal injection. But at the last minute, the state’s Republican governor, Kevin Stitt, decided to accept a recommendation from the clemency commission, which recommended on Nov. 5 that the sentence be commuted to life.
The decision “takes into account the same sentence imposed on (Wood’s brother) for the murder of a young innocent man and guarantees the severe punishment” of the “dangerous criminal” so that he “can never harm” anyone else, Mr. Stitt explained in a statement.
The governor, in office nearly seven years, had commuted only one other death sentence to life, in 2021, four hours before the execution. The commission recommended the conversion of the sentence, judging that the defense by an appointed defense attorney was not sufficient.
His older brother, with a stronger defense, was sentenced to life without parole. He had confessed that he fatally stabbed the victim and killed himself in prison in 2019.
Steven Bryant, 44, is expected to be shot by firing squad later today in South Carolina. Perpetrator of three murders in five days in 2004, he had left the authorities a playful message, written in the blood of his last victim: “Catch me if you can.”
35 executions by 2025
The US has so far carried out a total of 42 executions since the start of the year, the highest number since 2012, when there were 43.
In the vast majority of them, they were done by lethal injection solutions, 35 so far in 2025.
Another five were done by inducing suffocation by inhaling nitrogen, a method used for the first time in the world in Alabama in 2024 and characterized by UN experts as a form of “torture”. Two were carried out by firing squads in South Carolina; before this year, the method had been used in the state since 2010.
The death penalty has been abolished in 23 of the 50 US states. In three others – California, Oregon, Pennsylvania – a moratorium is applied to its implementation, by virtue of decisions of their governors.
Source: APE-MPE, AFP
