Tennessee death row inmate will be executed on Thursday, Dec. 11. Tennessee Governor Bill Lee released the following statement regarding death row inmate Harold Wayne Nichols:

“After deliberate consideration of Harold Wayne Nichols’ request for clemency, and after a thorough review of the case, I am upholding the sentence of the State of Tennessee and do not plan to intervene.”

Nichols was convicted of the 1988 rape and murder of a Chattanooga university student, Karen Pulley.

Nichols has never denied that he is the cause of the profound pain of the victim's family, acknowledging that he committed horrific crimes decades ago. After he was arrested in January 1989 for raping four women in the Chattanooga area, he confessed to those attacks. He also admitted that he had broken into Pulley’s home months earlier and raped her before hitting her over the head with a wooden board. Although a roommate found her alive, according to court documents, she died the next day. Nichols later pleaded guilty to felony murder, aggravated rape, and burglary. The jury sentenced him to death, although six jurors are quoted in Nichols’ clemency application saying they either would have chosen life without the possibility of parole if it had been an option at the time or would have reconsidered their stance on the death sentence since.

“I wish that there was something I could do to change the things that happened,” he said during his sentencing hearing, according to trial transcripts cited by his attorneys in his clemency application. “I know that all these families and friends are hurting. I know Miss Pulley’s family is hurting. And I’m not asking [them] for forgiveness. I don’t expect that. But if I could change places with Karen, I would.”

Nichols’ attorneys wrote about the torturous boyhood that came before he became a man with so much to atone for. His father was “a violent, intimidating, and profoundly mentally unhinged man who terrorized his family” with physical, sexual, and emotional abuse. His mother died of breast cancer when he was 10 years old, after which the abuse intensified. Leaders at the family’s church threatened to report him if he didn’t give up the children. Nichols and his sister were then moved to a church-run orphanage, which only turned out to be a different kind of hell.