The U. S. Supreme Court lifted a temporary stay for the planned execution on Thursday of a 75-year-old Alabama prisoner who has spent more than three decades on death row and faced seven previous execution dates.
The U.S. Supreme Court lifted a temporary stay for the planned execution on Thursday of a 75-year-old Alabama prisoner who has spent more than three decades on death row and faced seven previous execution dates.
The Supreme Court order allows the state of Alabama to put Tommy Arthur to death by lethal injection before the midnight deadline and comes after the court halted the execution earlier in the evening.
Arthur has maintained his innocence for the 1982 murder of his girlfriend's husband.
Three juries have found him guilty of shooting Troy Wicker to death as he slept. Two convictions were overturned on constitutional grounds. After his third conviction in 1991, Arthur asked the jury to sentence him to death.
He has been fighting his punishment since.
"Until I take my last breath, I'll have hope," Arthur told NBC News in an interview last week.
In November, the U.S. Supreme Court stayed Arthur's previous scheduled execution after he argued Alabama's lethal injection procedures amounted to cruel and unusual punishment.
In February, the court declined to hear Arthur's appeal, which focused on Alabama's use of the sedative midazolam. Examples of the drug's inability to render executions painless are increasing, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said in a dissent.
In new appeals, Arthur said Alabama in December injected inmate Ronald Smith with painful execution drugs while Smith was still conscious.
Alabama "plans to do the same to Mr. Arthur," his lawyers said in an appeal rejected by the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
State attorneys said evidence backs the drug protocol.
No physical evidence links Arthur to the murder, and Alabama has refused to allow DNA testing of a wig worn by the killer, his lawyers have noted.
Arthur would be the 12th person executed this year in the United States and the first in Alabama, the Death Penalty Information Center said.
(This article has not been edited by DNA's editorial team and is auto-generated from an agency feed.)
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