Lance Shockley, pictured in prison, is set to be one of two inmates executed in the U.S. on Tuesday, Oct. 14.
Sgt. Carl "Dewayne" Graham Jr. of the Missouri State Highway Patrol is pictured.
Samuel Smithers is pictured in prison.

Two inmates have been executed an hour apart during what's expected to be the single busiest month for the death penalty in the U.S. in nearly 15 years.

Florida executed Samuel Lee Smithers on Tuesday, Oct. 14, for murdering two Tampa women in 1996. Smithers, who was pronounced dead at 6:15 p.m. ET, became the 14th inmate executed in the state this year, a record.

About an hour later, Missouri executed Lance Shockley for the murder of a Missouri state trooper in 2005. He was pronounced dead at 7:13 p.m. ET., the Associated Press reported.

Smithers' and Shockley's executions are among seven this October − four of them this week alone. If they all move forward, it will be the single busiest month for executions in the U.S. since May 2011, according to a USA TODAY analysis of a database kept by the Death Penalty Information Center, a nonprofit that tracks the use of the death penalty in the U.S. without taking a position on it.

The busy October comes amid an overall rise in executions in 2025 and an expansion of the execution methods used as experts attribute the increase to the political climate under President Donald Trump. So far this year, states have executed 37 inmates − a figure that hasn't been seen since 2014.

Here's what to know about Tuesday's executions.

Missouri executes 1st inmate of the year

Missouri executed Lance Shockley, 48, by lethal injection for the 2005 murder of 37-year-old Sgt. Carl "Dewayne" Graham Jr. of the Missouri State Highway Patrol. Graham, a father of a 4-year-old boy at the time, was ambushed and shot in the back with a high-powered rifle as he arrived home in the small rural city of Van Buren. He was then shot in the head.

Prosecutors argued that Shockley killed Graham because the trooper was investigating him as the prime suspect in a case of leaving the scene of a fatal accident.

Shockley has always said he is innocent of the murder. At trial, his attorney told jurors that there was no witness to the crime, no DNA, no confession, and no ballistic or physical evidence connecting Shockley to Graham's murder.

The Missouri Supreme Court found in 2013 that the circumstantial evidence in the case was "strong" and that it was enough to hold up the death sentence.

Shockley's current attorneys had recently been fighting for DNA testing of the evidence in the case that wasn't available in 2005. No court granted him the DNA testing and last month, the Missouri Court of Appeals declined to consider multiple briefs from forensic DNA experts about the case.

Missouri Gov. Mike Kehoe said in a statement that Graham's murder was an attack "on the rule of law itself."

“Violence against those who risk their lives every day to protect our communities will never be tolerated," he said, adding that Shockley got "every legal protection afforded to him under the Missouri and United States Constitutions."

Kehoe added: "Carrying out Lance Shockley's sentence is evidence of our commitment to the pursuit of justice."

Shockley's execution was the state's first in more than a year.

Florida executes record 14th inmate of the year

Florida executed Samuel Lee Smithers, 72, for murdering two Tampa women in 1996: 24-year-old Denise Roach and 31-year-old Christy Cowan.

Smithers, a married deacon at a church in the Tampa suburb of Plant City, made a partial confession to killing both women, who were sex workers, and dumping them in a Plant City pond.

Smithers told police that he got into an argument with Cowan over money he owed her for sex, so he hit her on the head with an axe, threw her in the pond and "finished her off" with a garden hoe, according to court records.

Smithers told police that he also argued with Roach, and that he hit her and threw her into the pond, but he testified at trial that he watched another man kill her. At trial, he also blamed Cowan's killing on the man, whom he said was blackmailing him.

Smithers' current attorneys most recently argued that executing an elderly person violates his constitutional protections against cruel and unusual punishment and no longer served the initial purpose of his death sentence.

Smithers is the 14th inmate executed in Florida this year, a record that far eclispes the state's previous yearly high of eight executions, reached in 1984 and 2014.

When are the next executions?

Two more executions are expected this week: Mississippi is set to execute Charles Ray Crawford on Wednesday for the 1993 rape and murder of 20-year-old college student Kristy Ray. Two days later, Arizona is set to execute Richard Djerf for the 1993 murder of a Phoenix family of four.

Five more executions are scheduled in November and December, putting the U.S. on pace to see at least 44 executions this year. That's more than any other single year since 2010, though that's still far short of the peak of the death penalty in the U.S. in 1999, when states executed 98 inmates.

Amanda Lee Myers is a senior crime reporter who covers executions for USA TODAY. Follow her on X at @amandaleeusat.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Double execution: Florida, Missouri execute inmates for killings of 2 women, trooper

Reporting by Amanda Lee Myers, USA TODAY / USA TODAY

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