INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Walter Moody, who has spent more than 20 years on death row, has maintained his innocence.
Alabama is set on Thursday to execute an 83-year-old convicted
pipe-bomb killer, believed to be the oldest person put to death in the modern era of US capital punishment.The execution of Walter Moody is
planned for 6 pm CDT (2300 GMT) at the William C
Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore
He would be the eighth inmate put to death this year in the United States.If the execution is carried out, Moody would replace John Nixon,
who was 77 when put to death in December 2005 in Mississippi, as the oldest person executed since the US Supreme Court reinstated the death
penalty in 1976, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, which monitors US capital punishment.Moody was convicted of mailing a
bomb in 1989 that killed US Circuit Court Judge Robert Vance, 58, and another explosive that killed Georgia civil rights attorney Robert
Robinson.Prosecutors have said Moody sent the bomb to the judge in anger over a 1972 bomb conviction that Moody felt derailed his career,
and sent the other to the civil rights lawyer to confuse investigators.Moody, who has spent more than 20 years on death row, has maintained
his innocence and his lawyers have not yet used his age in appeals seeking to halt the execution
He has applied for clemency at the state level.Lawyers for Moody filed last-minute appeals with the US Supreme Court to spare Moody's life
based on his transfer from the federal court system to Alabama's.Moody first received seven life sentences in a US district court in 1991
for the deadly bombing series
Alabama later indicted him on capital murder charges and his trial began in the state in 1996, court records showed.Moody's lawyer argued
the transfer to an Alabama prison was illegal and he should first serve his federal sentence, asking the Supreme Court to halt the
execution.Lawyers for Alabama responded that the federal government consented to the transfer and the state had the right to implement the
death penalty handed out by an Alabama court.Age and poor health were major factors in a botched execution in Alabama earlier this year when
the state tried to put to death Doyle Hamm, 61, who had terminal cancer and severely compromised veins.The execution was called off while
Hamm, who survived the ordeal, was on a death chamber gurney and medical staff could not place a line for the lethal injection.© Thomson
