Keith Gavin is scheduled to die Thursday evening by lethal injection for killing a delivery driver in 1998 despite a federal judge ruling that the Alabama man had ineffective counsel at his sentencing hearing, according to reports.
Gavin, 64, was sentenced to death in the March 1998 murder of William Clayton Jr.
Prosecutors said Gavin gunned down Clayton during an attempted robbery after Clayton stopped at an ATM to get cash to take his wife to dinner, the Associated Press reported.
Gavin at the time was on parole in Illinois after serving 17 years of a 34-year murder sentence, the AP revealed.
He was convicted of killing Clayton by a jury that voted 10-2 for the death sentence, which a judge imposed.
But in 2020, a federal judge ruled that Gavin's lawyers failed to present more mitigating evidence of Gavin's violent childhood.
Gavin was raised in a "gang-infested housing project in Chicago, living in overcrowded houses that were in poor condition, where he was surrounded by drug activity, crime, violence, and riots," District Judge Karon O. Bowdre wrote, the AP reported.
But a federal appeals court overturned the ruling and allowed the death sentence to stand.
Gavin, who has now been handling his own appeals, filed a handwritten request Wednesday with the U.S. Supreme Court seeking a stay of execution, claiming a circuit court had turned down an earlier appeal because he did not pay the filing fee.
Gavin claimed the fee should have been waived because of his indigent status.
