BOISE, Idaho (NEWSnet/AP) — The hour of Idaho prison inmate Thomas Eugene Creech’s death has been set, and it is rapidly approaching.

Creech’s execution will be the second in the U.S. this year, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

On Wednesday morning Idaho prison officials will ask the 73-year-old if he would like a mild sedative to help calm him before his execution at the Idaho Maximum Security Institution south of Boise. Then, at 10 a.m. local time, they will bring him into the execution chamber and strap him to a padded medical table.

Defense attorneys and the warden will check for any last-minute court orders that would halt the execution of Creech, who is one of the longest-serving death row inmates in the U.S.

Barring any legal stay, volunteers with medical training will insert a catheter into one of Creech’s veins. He’ll be given a chance to say his last words, and a spiritual advisor may pray with him. Then the state will inject a drug intended to kill the man who has been convicted of five murders in three states and is suspected in several more.

Creech has been imprisoned since 1974 and was originally sentenced to death for the shooting deaths of John Wayne Bradford and Edward Thomas Arnold. That sentence, however, was later changed to life in prison.

Then, in 1983, he was sentenced to death for the murder of David Dale Jensen, who was 22, disabled and serving time for a car theft when Creech beat him to death at the Idaho State Penitentiary on May 13, 1981.

During his clemency hearing, Ada County Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Jill Longhorst did not dispute that Creech can be polite and friendly with correctional officers. But she said he is a psychopath — a man who can be charming and likeable but who lacks remorse and empathy for others.

Creech’s attorneys filed a flurry of late appeals hoping to forestall his execution or have his sentence converted to life without release.

But judges who reviewed the petitions so far have found no grounds for leniency.

Creech’s last chance hinged on a petition to the U.S. Supreme Court filed late Monday night, asking that the execution be put on hold so the high court can weigh Creech’s claim that prosecutors lied during his clemency hearing, violating his due process rights.

Idaho’s death penalty was established in 1864, about 26 years before the territory became a state. Since that time, 29 executions have been carried out, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, including the state’s last hanging in 1957.

Executions became rare in the following decades. Creech will be only the fourth to be executed by Idaho since 1957, all of them by lethal injection.

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