Since the beginning of the year, the US has carried out 26 death sentences - the most in a decade, reported Agence France-Presse, quoted by BTA.
For comparison, in 2015, there were 28 executions in the country. However, nine more are scheduled this year.
Twenty-one of the executions were carried out by lethal injection, three by nitrogen inhalation, a form of torture according to the United Nations, and two by shooting in South Carolina, the first time the United States has carried out such a thing since 2010.
Nearly a third of the executions this year - eight - were in the state of Florida.
The most recent execution was that of Michael Bell. He was executed by lethal injection in Florida at 6:25 p.m. yesterday (1:25 a.m. Bulgarian time today).
Asked if he had any last words, the 54-year-old Bell replied: "Thank you for not letting me spend the rest of my life in prison."
The man was sentenced to death for a double murder in the city of Jacksonville in the state in 1993, AFP reports. He wanted to take revenge on the killer of his brother Lamar Bell - Theodore Wright, but instead shot his half-brother Jimmy West, 23, and Tameka Smith, 18.
Michael Bell is one of about thirty Americans on death row who spent their youth at the infamous Florida school for boys called "Dozier". Anthropologists discovered there in 2016 55 unmarked graves.
The school, where brutality was commonplace, was closed in 2011 after more than a century of existence. The case inspired the novel "The Nickel Boys" by African-American writer Colson Whitehead, which won the "Pulitzer" prize in 2020, notes Agence France-Presse.
"The increase in executions this year is the result of the decisions of a few elected officials in a small number of states," explained the Death Penalty Information Center. In a report published last week, the center argued that these executions were "highly concentrated geographically", with more than half of them carried out in three states - Florida, Texas and South Carolina.
The death penalty has been abolished in 23 of the 50 states in the United States. Three others - California, Oregon and Pennsylvania - have imposed moratoriums on executions by governor, AFP recalls.
In general, the number of executions has largely declined nationally this century, after peaking at 98 in 1999, the Associated Press reports. From 1995 to 2006, the United States averaged 67 executions per year.