America/Denis Staunton: At 6pm next Tuesday, 44-year-old Bobby Wilcher will die. Twenty-five years after he murdered two women who gave him a lift home from a nightclub, Wilcher will be strapped to a gurney and injected with poisons that will first paralyse him and then stop his heart.
If the execution receives little attention outside Wilcher's home state of Mississippi, it is because putting murderers to death has become almost routine in America since the Supreme Court overturned a ban on the death penalty 30 years ago this month.
Since then, more than 1,000 people have been executed, 41 per cent of them African-Americans or Hispanics, and more than 3,000 prisoners are on Death Row.
A Gallup poll last year showed that 64 per cent of Americans agree that the death penalty does not act as a deterrent to murder and does not lower the crime rate.
Sixty-three per cent believed that at least one innocent person had been executed within the past five years.
The same poll found, however, that a majority of Americans think that the death penalty is not imposed often enough and only 21 per cent say it is imposed too often.
Last month, the Supreme Court upheld a Kansas policy that makes the death penalty the "default sentence" if a jury cannot decide between life imprisonment and execution.
Justice David Souter dissented, pointing to 123 cases where prisoners on Death Row were exonerated as evidence of the death penalty's fallibility, but conservative Antonin Scalia dismissed such scruples.
"One cannot have a system of criminal punishment without accepting the possibility that someone will be punished mistakenly. But with regard to the punishment of death in the current American system, that possibility has been reduced to an insignificant minimum," Scalia wrote.
The conservative justice said that those "ideologically driven to ferret out and proclaim a mistaken modern execution" have been unable to find "a single verifiable case to point to".
In the same week that Scalia wrote those words, the Chicago Tribune published a meticulously researched investigative series casting grave doubt on the guilt of Carlos De Luna, who was executed in Texas in 1989.
De Luna was convicted of the fatal stabbing of a filling station assistant in 1983, and he went to his death proclaiming his innocence.
From the beginning, De Luna said an acquaintance, Carlos Hernandez, was the killer.
Friends and family of Hernandez, a violent criminal who died in prison in 1999, have now come forward to say he boasted of the crime and of letting De Luna take the blame for it.
The newspaper investigation calls into question the eyewitness evidence presented at trial and shows how leads concerning Hernandez were not followed up.
De Luna's sister, Rose Rhoton, this week joined a campaign in Texas for a commission to investigate claims that innocent prisoners have been put to death in the state, which executes more people than any other US state.
"My brother was killed by the state of Texas on December 7th, 1989. He insisted time after time that he did not commit this crime. But nobody ever took the time to investigate," she said.
There is no mechanism under Texas law to investigate such cases or pay compensation to the family of an inmate wrongfully executed and the Texas legislature has shown little interest in the idea.
A Democratic state senator has twice introduced bills to create an innocence commission to study old death penalty cases, but neither bill made it to the senate floor.
Courts in a number of states have halted executions amid fears that the lethal injection may be more painful than was previously believed.
When Joseph Clark was executed in Ohio on May 2nd, it took 22 minutes for the execution technicians to find a vein suitable for insertion of the catheter.
Three or four minutes later, as the vein collapsed and Clark's arm began to swell, he raised his head off the gurney and said five times, "It don't work. It don't work."
The curtains surrounding the gurney were then closed while the technicians worked for 30 minutes to find another vein and witnesses said they heard "moaning, crying out and guttural noises".
Clark was pronounced dead almost 90 minutes after the execution started.
Four executions scheduled for this month are likely to be stayed but a further nine are expected to go ahead, four of them in Texas.