A Cobb County judge stayed the execution of Stacey Humphreys late Tuesday, halting a plan that would have seen Georgia and Texas carry out death sentences within an hour of each other on Wednesday. The stay means Georgia cannot move forward unless a higher court lifts or overturns it.
Humphreys, 53, was convicted in the 2003 murders of real estate agents Lori Brown, 21, and Cindy Williams, 33. His execution had been scheduled for Wednesday before the judge intervened.
Texas is still set to execute LeJames Norman, 40, on Wednesday for the 2005 triple murder of his neighbors during a robbery. Alabama plans to execute Jeffery Lee, 50, on Thursday for a double murder committed during a 1998 pawn shop robbery.
Death Penalty Information Center Executive Director Robin Maher told Fox News Digital that clustering executions this tightly is rare.
“It’s not very common to have this many executions just across a couple of days,” Maher said. “This month, the month of September, we have seven executions scheduled. Last year in October, we had seven executions in a single month. But before then, we’d have to go back all the way to 2010 to see that number in a single month.”
Maher pointed to other recent clusters, including three executions on the same day in August and a similar pileup earlier this year. “There’s no evidence there’s any coordination among the states to have all these executions occur simultaneously. This looks largely to be a coincidence,” she said.
On Aug. 13, Tennessee, Oklahoma and Alabama each carried out a lethal injection on the same day — the first time three states did so on the same day since January 7, 2010. On July 28, Florida executed two men in a single day, its first double execution in decades.
Florida Driving the National Numbers
The U.S. has carried out 25 executions so far in 2026, with 14 more scheduled for the rest of the year, though that figure can shift with court stays or new death warrants. Last year, 11 states carried out 47 executions total, the most in a single year since 2009.
Florida leads the country by a wide margin, executing 19 inmates in 2025 — more than 40% of the national total that year — and 15 so far in 2026, or 60% of this year’s count. Combined, Florida accounts for roughly 47% of all U.S. executions across 2025 and 2026.
Texas, Alabama and South Carolina round out the states with the most executions in that span, with eight, six and five respectively. Texas carried out five in 2025 and three in 2026 so far; Alabama executed five in 2025 and one in 2026; South Carolina put five people to death, all in 2025.
“Last year was a very unusual year. It was the most executions we’ve seen in 15 years in the United States,” Maher said. “This year, we do not expect to reach that number of executions again… but I don’t think we’ll reach the high that we reached last year.”
Maher attributed much of the recent surge to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. “Gov. DeSantis has decided that he wants to set a record in the number of executions that are conducted during his term. He has scheduled an execution for roughly every two weeks in the state of Florida, both last year and this year,” she said.
Two more Florida executions remain scheduled for 2026: Curtis Beasley, 77, on Sept. 29, for the 1995 murder of a woman bludgeoned with a hammer, and William Lee Thompson, 74, on Oct. 13, for the 1976 murder of a woman beaten, tortured and killed with a chain-link belt.
