US set to execute 1,000th person

A CONVICTED killer from North Carolina is today set to become the 1,000th person executed in the US since capital punishment was reinstated in 1976, barring an unlikely intervention from the federal courts or the state governor.

Unless they intervene, 57-year-old Kenneth Lee Boyd will be put to death by injection at 2am local time (7am Irish time), earning a man who shot and killed his estranged wife and her father an infamous place in American history.

"I'd hate to be remembered as that," Boyd said in a prison interview on Wednesday. "I don't like the idea of being picked as a number."