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| - The US state of Alabama was due Thursday to execute a man found guilty of murdering of three police officers, despite a high-profile campaign to save him led by celebrity Kim Kardashian. Nathaniel Woods, 44, was accused of being the "mastermind" behind the 2004 deaths of police officers allegedly lured into an ambush when they tried to arrest him over drug charges. Woods did not pull the trigger but was given the same sentence as the gunman, Kerry Spencer. Spencer described Woods as "100 percent" innocent in a recent letter to US media, saying that "I know this to be a fact because I'm the person that shot and killed all three of the officers." Woods, who has always protested his innocence, was convicted by 10 of the 12 jurors in 2005. Alabama is the only US state that does not require an unanimous verdict to impose the death penalty. Kardashian, a regular campaigner against the death penalty, tweeted that Woods was "scheduled to be executed in Alabama TONIGHT for murders he did NOT commit." She joined about 120,000 people who have urged Alabama Governor Kay Ivey to grant a reprieve. "Are you willing to allow a potentially innocent man to be executed?" Martin Luther King III, son of the civil rights leader, asked in a letter to the governor posted on Twitter. Lawyers have also lobbied the Supreme Court for a stay over the method of execution, which would be by lethal injection. If the death penalty is enacted, Woods would be the fifth person to die by execution in 2020 in the United States. chp/bgs/caw/
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