A judge in the United States has denied a prisoner's bid to delay his execution almost 40 years after murdering an eight-year-old girl.
According to a ruling posted on Sunday, U.S. District Judge Michael Liburdi decided to keep the execution of Frank Atwood scheduled for tomorrow.
The convict argued against the federal judge and said that the state's death penalty procedures would violate his constitutional right against cruel and unusual punishment by subjecting him to unimaginable pain.
His lawyers also added that Atwood, who has a degenerative spinal condition that has left him in a wheelchair, would undergo excruciating suffering if he were strapped to a gurney while lying on his back during his lethal injection execution.
Liburdi said in the ruling made Saturday that he would not block the execution based on Atwood's claim.
He also noted that the state will provide Atwood with a medical wedge that will relieve pressure on his spine and can also tilt the execution table, saying those accommodations "will minimise the pain Plaintiff experiences when he lies on his back".
Liburdi also wrote that the US Constitution "does not require a pain-free execution" and that Atwood's position will be similar to what he typically assumes in his cell to limit pain.
However, Atwood's lawyers have continued to spar with the state over religious accommodations prior to and during his execution as he has been a practitioner of the Greek Orthodox faith for more than two decades. Therefore, he wants the state to allow him to undergo a religious initiation ceremony before the execution itself.
The US judge has also rejected challenges to the drug the state plans to use, and dismissed Atwood's claim over the Arizona's use of the gas chamber. They have said this is irrelevant because he will be executed using lethal injection.
Further to this, two weeks ago, Atwood declined to choose between lethal injection or the gas chamber - leaving him to be put to death by lethal injection, the state's default execution method.
"The state's insistence on cyanide gas is a cynical choice to force the acceptance of the danger and incompetence of its lethal injection method, at the cost of embracing Nazi methods of mass extermination," Joseph Perkovich, an attorney for Atwood, said in an email Sunday.
The method of execution is only one of the last-minute appeals made by Atwood, as he is also asking the Arizona Supreme Court to delay his execution while his lawyers pursue claims that he is actually innocent of killing the little girl. That court denied a stay late last week, but is now considering the new claim.
Atwood was convicted of murder in the 1984 killing of Vicki Lynn Hoskinson. The girl was riding her bicycle to mail a birthday card to her aunt in Tucson - a small city in Arizona - when Atwood allegedly snatched her, KPHO-TV reported.
Hoskinson's remains were found shortly after, northwest of Tucson in April 1985. However, experts could not determine the cause of death from the remains that were found, according to court records.
Speaking about the death of her girl, her mother Debbie Carlson told KPHO-TV last month: "I don't think you really ever get closure.
"And I kind of don't like that word because she's never coming back, you know?"
Atwood maintains that he is innocent of the crime.
Until last month, Arizona went almost eight years without carrying out an execution.
The states of Arizona, California, Missouri and Wyoming are the only ones with decades-old lethal-gas execution laws still on the books.
Arizona has 112 prisoners left on the state's death row.
