Weisheit, 50, was pronounced dead at 12:45 a.m. after last-minute legal challenges and a clemency bid failed.
MICHIGAN CITY, IN — Indiana executed Jeffrey Weisheit by lethal injection early Thursday at the Indiana State Prison for murdering 8-year-old Alyssa Lynch and her 5-year-old brother, Caleb Lynch, in a 2010 house fire near Evansville. State officials said Weisheit was pronounced dead at 12:45 a.m. CST and had no final words.
The execution came after Gov. Mike Braun denied Weisheit’s request to commute his death sentence to life in prison without parole and the Indiana Supreme Court rejected a final request to stop the execution. Weisheit’s attorneys had raised concerns about his mental health and neurological condition and, in the hours before his death, challenged Indiana’s lethal-injection process and its supply of pentobarbital.
Weisheit was convicted in 2013 of two counts of murder and arson after a jury heard evidence about the April 9, 2010, fire at the Evansville-area home where he lived with the children’s mother, Lisa Lynch. Lynch was working an overnight shift, and Weisheit was responsible for caring for Alyssa and Caleb. Both children died in the fire. The jury recommended the death penalty, and the trial court imposed it.
The Indiana Supreme Court later upheld Weisheit’s convictions and sentence. He pursued additional state and federal appeals over the following years. In August, the state Supreme Court ordered that his execution take place Nov. 5 before sunrise at the Indiana State Prison in Michigan City. The execution was Indiana’s fourth since the state resumed carrying out death sentences in December 2024 after a roughly 15-year pause.
Weisheit sought clemency as the execution date approached. The Indiana Parole Board met with him Oct. 16 and held public hearings Oct. 19 to hear arguments for and against commuting his sentence. In an Oct. 28 recommendation to Braun, the board said it had reviewed court proceedings, correctional records, evaluations, testimony and letters submitted by members of the public. The board unanimously recommended that Braun deny clemency.
The board said Weisheit had acknowledged during the clemency process that he set the fire, although he disputed parts of the prosecution’s account of how it began. The board also considered evidence and testimony about his mental health and possible neurological problems, along with his conduct in prison. It concluded that the information did not justify reducing his death sentence to life without parole.
Braun accepted the board’s recommendation and denied clemency. After the execution, the governor said Weisheit’s case had been reviewed repeatedly by state and federal courts since his conviction and that those reviews had not overturned his sentence. Braun said the sentence had been carried out as ordered by the court.
Weisheit’s lawyers continued pressing for a delay in the final days. They had previously asked for additional time to obtain brain imaging that they said could support his clemency case. The Indiana Supreme Court rejected requests to postpone the execution and clemency proceedings, saying Weisheit had not established a legal basis for the court to order his transportation for medical imaging.
Hours before the scheduled execution, Weisheit also challenged the state’s planned use of pentobarbital. His lawyers questioned the sourcing, testing and storage of the drug and argued that the state’s procedures raised constitutional and legal concerns. The state opposed a stay, arguing that Weisheit had waited too long to raise the method-of-execution claims and had not met the legal requirements for delaying the sentence.
The Indiana Supreme Court denied the emergency stay late Wednesday. Chief Justice Loretta Rush and Justice Christopher Goff dissented from that decision and would have granted a 10-day delay for additional information about the execution drugs, including their formulation, expiration, storage and testing. The other three justices voted to allow the execution to proceed.
Department of Correction officials said the execution process began shortly after midnight Thursday. A media witness reported that the viewing window into the execution chamber was open for only part of the procedure, limiting what could be observed. State officials ultimately announced that Weisheit had died at 12:45 a.m.
Weisheit’s execution was also the first of three executions scheduled in the United States on Thursday, with executions also planned in Florida and Alabama. In Indiana, his death closed the execution phase of a case that had moved through the courts for more than a decade, while questions raised by his attorneys about the state’s lethal-injection drug procurement remained part of separate public and regulatory scrutiny.
Author note: Last updated November 5, 2026.