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."

Boyd's attorneys have filed appeals with the 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals and the US Supreme Court, as well as a clemency application with Governor Mike Easley.

Larger-than-normal crowds of protesters were expected in Raleigh yesterday, and vigils were planned across the state.

But Boyd's hopes for a last-minute reprieve appear slim. There is no doubt about his guilt and his case does not include the kind of legal concerns that led Virginia Governor Mark Warner to spare the life Tuesday of Robin Lovitt, who was set to be number 1,000 for stabbing a man to death with a pair of scissors during a pool-hall robbery.

In that case, Mr Warner said key evidence - namely the bloody scissors - had been improperly destroyed, preventing the defence from subjecting it to the latest in DNA testing.

A similar incident involving lost evidence led Mr Easley to grant clemency to a death row inmate in 2002, and he did it one other time, in 2001, when defence attorneys argued the jury was racially biased against their client.

In all, 22 killers have been put to death during Mr Easley's nearly five years as governor.

In his clemency petition, Boyd's attorneys argued his experiences in Vietnam - where as a bulldozer operator he was shot at by snipers daily - contributed to his crimes.

Boyd called the death penalty "nothing but revenge."

"I feel like I should be in prison for the rest of my life," he said. "I never expect to get paroled out if I got off."

Earlier yesterday, Stanley "Tookie" Williams, co-founder of the Crips street gang and a man praised by President George W Bush, moved one step closer to the death chamber when the California Supreme Court refused to reopen his case.

Williams, 51, in a last-ditch legal move, alleged that shoddy forensic testing and other errors may have wrongly sent him to San Quentin State Prison, where he is scheduled die by lethal injection on December 13.

His lawyers asked that judges allow the re-examination of evidence that showed a shotgun registered to Williams was used to kill three people during a motel robbery in 1979.

Williams' supporters point to his efforts to curb youth gang violence as reason for Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to grant clemency.

In August, Williams received a President's Call to Service Award for his good deeds on death row, complete with a letter from President Bush praising him for demonstrating "the outstanding character of America."