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Tennessee death row inmate Harold Wayne Nichols has refused to select his preferred execution method for his scheduled death on December 11.
This means the state will move forward with lethal injection.
Nichols received the death penalty in 1990 after being found guilty of the rape and murder of 21-year-old Chattanooga State University student Karen Pulley, which had occurred two years earlier.
According to Tennessee Department of Corrections spokeswoman Dorinda Carter, they have two weeks to reconsider their choice of method.
Nicholas was earlier scheduled to be hanged in 2020, he had then opted for the electric chair, but due to the Covid-19 pandemic, he got relief from hanging.
In Tennessee, prisoners convicted of crimes before January 1999 are allowed to opt for electric shock rather than the state’s standard lethal injection.
While the electric chair is permitted in many US states, it has been used only five times in the past decade, all instances occurring in Tennessee.
At the time Nichols chose electrocution, Tennessee’s lethal injection protocol used three different drugs in series. It was a process that the prisoners’ lawyers claimed was fraught with problems.
Their concerns appeared to have merit in 2022, when Governor Bill Lee postponed executions, including a second execution date for Nichols. An independent review of the state’s lethal injection process found that none of the drugs prepared for seven inmates executed in Tennessee since 2018 were properly tested.
The Department of Corrections released a new execution protocol last December that uses the single drug pentobarbital.
Lawyers for several death row inmates have filed suit over the new protocols, but a hearing in that case is not scheduled until April.
Nichols confessed to the rape and murder of Pulley, as well as several other rapes in the Chattanooga area. Although he expressed remorse at the trial, he acknowledged that he would have continued his violent behavior if he had not been arrested.