A death row inmate is set to be executed Thursday night despite objections from the family of the woman he murdered.
Joe Nathan James Jr is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection at William C Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore, Alabama, at 6pm CT.
A federal appeals court has denied James’ request to put a hold on his execution.
James was convicted and sentenced to death for shooting and killing his ex-girlfriend Faith Hall in 1994.
Prosecutors said James became obsessed with Hall after she rejected him. He stalked and harassed her for months before breaking into her friend’s apartment and shooting her three times.
James was first convicted of capital murder in 1996, but an appeals court overturned the conviction after it found a judge wrongly admitted some evidence.
He was retried and convicted again in 1999, and sentenced to death.
Hall’s two surviving daughters were three and six years old when she was killed. They have both since advocated for sparing his life.
‘We thought about it and prayed about it, and we found it in ourselves to forgive him for what he did,’ said Terryln Hall.
She added that his execution was ‘not going to bring my mom back.’
James reportedly spent his last few weeks acting as his own attorney and filing multiple lawsuits against the state, hoping to delay his execution until they all were resolved. A federal judge saw through the plan and threw out the lawsuit, AL.com reported.
On Thursday afternoon, James filed another motion asking the Supreme Court to stay his execution, stating that it would violate his First Amendment rights as a practicing Muslim and his victims’ rights since they do not want him to see him killed.
However, it remained unlikely that Alabama Governor Kay Ivey would intervene and grant a stay on the execution.
‘My staff and I have researched all the records and all the facts and there’s no reason to change the procedure or modify the outcome,’ she previously said.
‘The execution will go forward.’
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