The Supreme Court rejected a request to stay the execution of 50-year-old Joe Nathan James Jr., who was convicted in 1996 of killing his ex-girlfriend, The Hill reported.
"The application for stay of execution of sentence of death presented to Justice [Clarence] Thomas and by him referred to the Court is denied," the order read.
With the last-ditch effort from his legal team failing, James was set to receive a lethal injection at 6 p.m. Central Daylight Time Thursday at a prison in southern Alabama, according to NPR.
Prosecutors stated that James became obsessed with his ex-girlfriend Faith Hall and harassed her for months before killing the 26-year-old in August 1994. Court documents showed that James shot Hall three times after breaking inside of an apartment.
Although initially convicted in 1996, his murder charge was overturned when a state appeals court ruled a judge wrongly admitted some irrelevant evidence. Three years later, James was retried and sentenced to death.
Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall urged Republican Gov. Kay Ivey, who has mostly stayed out of the proceedings, to allow the execution to move forward despite some backlash from activists.
"The jury in James' case unanimously decided that his brutal murder of Faith Hall warranted a sentence of death," Marshall said.
In an interview with The Associated Press, one of Hall's daughters, Terryln Hall, told the outlet that she opposed executing James and preferred that he spends life in prison, saying she feels "we can't play God."
"We thought about it and prayed about it, and we found it in ourselves to forgive him for what he did. We really wish there was something that we could do to stop it," said Terryln Hall, who was just a toddler at the time of the murder.
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