OKLAHOMA CITY, Okla. — Oklahoma executed a 70-year-old man Thursday for the 2003 murder of his wife, one of three executions carried out across the country on the same day. The three executions marked the first time in nearly 16 years that three people were put to death in the United States on the same day, according to recent data.
Carlos Cuesta-Rodríguez received the death penalty by lethal injection for the 2003 murder of his wife, Olimpia Cardina Fisher, who was 43 at the time of her murder. Cuesta-Rodríguez, while intoxicated, shot her in one eye as he accused her of cheating.
When Fisher and her pregnant daughter attempted to flee, Cuesta-Rodríguez shot Fisher in the other eye, and she succumbed to her injuries. These events followed weeks of “controlling” and “violent” behavior, according to USA Today.
Last month, the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board denied Cuesta-Rodríguez’s attorney’s request for clemency in a 3-1 vote. Cuesta-Rodríguez reportedly did not want mercy and believed he deserved the death penalty.
He also apologized to Fisher’s two daughters, according to the Oklahoma Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, or OK-CADP.
“The OK-CADP extends deepest sympathies to the families of Olimpia Cardina Fisher and Carlos Cuesta-Rodríguez,” Dr. Elizabeth Overman, OK-CADP chair, said in a statement Aug. 13. “Nobody benefited from today’s execution and the costs to the people of Oklahoma are steep.”
The OK-CADP is a nonprofit organization dedicated to “alternative” methods of justice through education, advocacy, legislation and more, according to its website.
The organization condemned the state for executing Cuesta-Rodríguez, arguing that life in prison would have been a more humane, sustainable and cost-effective option, it stated in its press release.
“The people in the state are not any safer because Mr. Cuesta-Rodríguez is dead and they are poorer because, counterintuitively, studies show that implementing the death penalty is significantly more expensive than life in prison,” Overman continued in OK-CADP’s statement. “Money that could go into education is used instead to carry out a killing that does not make society any safer and does not guarantee that violence and chaos won’t occur in the future.”
The Death Penalty Information Center, or DPIC, found that the death penalty costs taxpayers 2.5 to five times more than life imprisonment because of the need for expensive drugs and other materials necessary for executions, highly qualified legal teams, extensive security and additional funds in cases of wrongful convictions, among other reasons.
Death penalty cases also take four times as long to process, from filing charges to delivering sentences, the DPIC reported, and require nearly two to three times as many resources.
Wrongful convictions in death penalty cases result in much higher compensation, the DPIC stated. In 2024, the city of Edmond, Oklahoma, paid Glynn Simmons, “the longest-incarcerated innocent person in the United States,” $7.15 million.
Two other men were executed Thursday along with Cuesta-Rodríguez, making it the first time in nearly 16 years that three people were executed on the same day, the BBC reported.
Anthony Darrell Hines, 66, was executed by lethal injection in Tennessee for the 1985 murder of Catherine Jean Jenkins, who was 54 at the time of her death, according to USA Today. She was a mother of four and a hotel maid.
Hines was convicted of stealing $100 from Jenkins, stabbing her and taking her car, USA Today also reported. While he admitted to taking her car, he maintained that he did not murder her.
Jeremy Williams, 42, was executed in Alabama for the 2021 rape and murder of a 5-year-old girl from Georgia, USA Today reported. Williams reportedly paid the child’s mother, Kristy Siple, to “sexually abuse” her.
He was convicted of “murder, sodomy, sexual abuse of a child, production of obscene material involving a child, human trafficking and abuse of a corpse,” according to USA Today.
The Trump administration has expanded the ways in which someone could receive the death penalty, including by firing squad and the readoption of lethal injections. The administration has encouraged the death penalty to be used in cases involving the deaths of police officers, the BBC also reported.
Advocacy groups maintain that the death penalty is inhumane, cost-ineffective and depletes the legal system of resources. They argue that alternative methods, such as life without parole or concurrent life sentences, are more sustainable options for both the accused and victims’ families, who are subjected to the “uncertainty of securing a death sentence,” according to the DPIC.
“Every state homicide is a violation of the 8th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution,” Overman said in OK-CADP’s press release. “Each execution directly harms the people who carry it out in the name of the state and those who are adjacent to the people executed.”
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