Oklahoma executes Carlos Cuesta-Rodriguez

Oklahoma has carried out 1 of 3 executions set for the same day in the United States in another sign of the resurgence of the death penalty in the country.

Carlos Cuesta-Rodriguez was pronounced dead at 10:13 a.m. on Thursday, Aug. 13, at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester.

He was put to death by lethal injection for the murder of his common-law wife in 2003 at their Oklahoma City home. He admitted to police he shot her twice during an argument.

Cuesta-Rodriguez, 70, did not fight for his life, stunning his attorneys in July when he told the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board that he didn't want clemency. "It's time for me to pay for what I did," he said.

Executions also were scheduled Thursday in Tennessee and Alabama. If they also go forward, it will be the 1st triple execution in the United States in 16 years.

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Cuesta-Rodriguez shot Olimpia Fisher at their south Oklahoma City home early May 31, 2003. He used a double-barrel Derringer-style handgun that fired shotgun shells.

He told police afterward she was cheating on him. Both his current attorneys and attorneys for the state said he was wrong in that belief.

He shot Fisher first in the right eye in front of her youngest daughter, who was 18 at the time and pregnant, according to testimony at his trial. Still alive, Fisher fought back as her daughter fled the house and called police.

He shot Fisher 8 minutes later in her left eye. By that time, police officers had arrived and heard her screams for help. The officers were unable to enter immediately because metal security bars blocked their entry.

He was 47 at the time. The victim was 43.

Jurors at a 2007 trial in Oklahoma County District Court found Cuesta-Rodriguez guilty of 1st-degree murder. They chose the death penalty as punishment after deciding he was a continuing threat to society and what he did was especially heinous, atrocious, or cruel.

"I can't have been in my right mind to have done something so horrific. To this day I have not been able to find any sense in all this," he said by video at the clemency hearing after apologizing to the victim's two daughters.

Police asked Cuesta-Rodriguez after the shooting, "What kind of punishment do you think you deserve?" according to a transcript of his interview.

"Be dead, like her," he said.

"To be dead like her?" he was asked.

"Yeah. I told her I won't live without her," he said.

Attorney General Gentner Drummond and his assistants told the Pardon and Parole Board that Cuesta-Rodriguez had been thinking about killing Fisher for months. They told the board he wrote his mother that Fisher was a whore who belonged to the pigs and that she would pay for her "sins."

The Pardon and Parole Board denied clemency in a 3-1 vote July 14.

His attorneys still tried to block his execution, arguing to the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals he should not be put to death because he is mentally ill.

They told the court he killed "amidst an acute mental health crisis characterized by psychotic delusions of infidelity and abandonment." They argued executing him would violate state and federal constitutional prohibitions against cruel and/or unusual punishment.

The appeals court on Aug. 6 denied his request for relief.

Cuesta-Rodriguez was born in Cuba and came to the United States with thousands of others during the 1980 Mariel Boatlift. He was locked up for years after a drug conviction in California changed his immigration status, his attorneys said.

He was eventually released in 1988 rather than being returned to Cuba. He first came to Oklahoma to stay at a halfway house.

The last time 3 states carried out executions on the same day was in 2010, according to a USA TODAY analysis of data kept by the nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center. That year the executions were in Ohio, Texas, and Louisiana.

Executions rose from 25 in 2024 to 47 in 2025, the Death Penalty Information Center reported.

"The change is due almost entirely to a dramatic increase in executions in Florida, which alone accounted for 19 executions, or 40% of the year’s total," it said.

Oklahoma had 2 executions in 2025 and three so far in 2026.

Also, President Donald Trump, on his 1st day back in office last year, issued a sweeping executive order "restoring" the death penalty. His order has resulted in the death penalty being sought in federal cases across the nation, including in Oklahoma.

Trump called capital punishment "an essential tool for deterring and punishing those who would commit the most heinous crimes and acts of lethal violence against American citizens." Trump directed the attorney general to pursue the death penalty "for all crimes of a severity demanding its use."

—Cuesta-Rodriguez becomes the 3rd condemned inmate to be put to death this year in Oklahoma and the 132nd overall since the state resumed capital punishment on Sept. 10, 1990. Only Texas and Florida have carried out more executions since the US Supreme Court decision of Gregg v. Georgia on July 2, 1976, which allowed states to start re-sentencing people to death after the Court ordered a moratorium on executions on June 29, 1972.

—Cuesta-Rodriguez becomes the 20th condemned inmate to be put to death this year in the USA and the 1,674th overall since the nation resumed executions on January 17, 1977.

Source: The Oklahoman, Staff; Rick Halperin, August 13, 2026

"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted."
— Oscar Wilde

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