A 50-year-old man is to be executed by lethal injection in the southern US state of Alabama on Thursday for the murders of an elderly couple.
Jamie Ray Mills was sentenced to death in 2007 for murdering Floyd Hill, 87, and Vera Hill, 72, during a robbery. They were killed with a machete, tire iron and hammer.
His wife, JoAnn Mills, was sentenced to life in prison without parole for her involvement in the 2004 murders and testified against her husband.
Mills is scheduled to be executed Thursday evening at the Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore, according to the Alabama Department of Corrections.
He will be the second inmate executed in Alabama this year. In January, Alabama carried out the first-ever execution in the United States using nitrogen gas but Mills is to be put to death by lethal injection.
There have been five executions in the United States this year. There were 24 executions in the country in 2023, all of them carried out by lethal injection.
According to a recent Gallup Poll, 53 percent of Americans support the death penalty for someone convicted of murder, the lowest level since 1972.
Capital punishment has been abolished in 23 states, while the governors of six others — Arizona, California, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania and Tennessee — have put a hold on its use.
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