Jeremy Williams, 42, has been executed in Alabama for the kidnap, rape and murder of five-year-old Kamarie Holland. He received a lethal injection at the William C. Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore after pleading guilty to the 2021 killing.
Details of the crime
Prosecutors said Williams raped and strangled Holland after offering her mother $2,500 for the child to perform oral sex on him. The payment was reduced to $1,300 (£960) after negotiations. Williams filmed his attack and kept her body to continue to abuse, prosecutors said.
Kamarie's mother told police that when she woke up at 5:50am on December 13, 2021, her daughter was gone and the front door of their Columbus, Georgia, home was open. The girl's body was found late that night at an abandoned home in nearby Phenix City, Alabama, where Williams once lived.
Sentencing and execution
In 2022, Williams was charged with four counts of capital murder after confessing. On March 13, 2024, he pleaded guilty to all four counts, asking for the death penalty to bring closure to the victim's family. He did not present any mitigating evidence during sentencing, so the trial court sentenced him to death.
Williams was also charged in 2022 with the 2005 death of his infant daughter in Alaska. "This man left a trail of destruction of children," said Russell County District Attorney Richard Chancey.
Three executions on one day
About 10% of executed inmates are so-called volunteers who drop appeals, according to the Death Penalty Information Centre. The time between Williams' 2024 conviction and his execution was unusually brief, said Robin Maher, executive director of the centre.
His execution came with two others in Tennessee and Oklahoma, the first time in nearly 16 years that three inmates have been put to death on the same day in the US. "You look at the country as a whole, you've just got this little pocket of five or six states that are using the death penalty," said Maher.
Oklahoma executed Carlos Cuesta-Rodriguez, 70, for the 2003 murder of his girlfriend. Prosecutors said Olimpia Fisher, 43, had been making plans to leave him when he shot her in one eye, waited about eight minutes, then fired the fatal shot into her other eye.
Anthony Darrell Hines was executed in Tennessee, three months after the attempted lethal injection of another inmate was called off because of problems inserting an IV. Hines, 66, had unsuccessfully asked the governor and courts to intervene, claiming the doctor who oversaw that execution was unqualified. Gov. Bill Lee declined to take action, and the Tennessee Supreme Court ruled against a stay.
Hines was convicted of stabbing Catherine Jean Jenkins to death in 1985 while she worked as a motel maid in Kingston Springs. He was sentenced to death in 1986, won an appeal for a new sentencing hearing, and was again sentenced to death in 1989.
