An inmate facing the first federal execution since 1963 has asked President Clinton to spare his life.
Lawyers for David Paul Hammer, 42, who had dropped all his court appeals this fall, filed the application recently with Hammer's approval, Justice Department spokeswoman Gretchen Michael said.
Michael said Hammer asked that his death sentence be commuted, but she would not disclose details of the petition, including what grounds it cited.
Hammer's attorney, Ronald Travis, said his client called early Monday to ask him to seek the president's intervention. 'He told me he had decided that he wanted to live,' Travis said in an interview.
Travis said his petition argues that other men convicted of killing inmates while in federal prison have not been sentenced to death.
'When we look at some of the horrific killings that have taken place in the federal system ... the federal death penalty is supposed to be for the worst of the worst, and we think neither Mr. Hammer nor his crime fit into that category,' Travis said.
Asked what changed Hammer's mind this week and prompted him to seek clemency, Travis said, 'I assume he arrived at that conclusion because he believes, or has come to believe, that he can actually live in prison as opposed to just existing.'
A con man so violent that Oklahoma built him a special isolation cell with steel doors and shatterproof glass, Hammer is scheduled to die by lethal injection Nov. 15.
The date was set by a federal judge in Williamsport, Pa., in September after a judicial panel granted Hammer's request to drop an appeal of his death sentence.
Hammer is on federal death row in Terre Haute, Ind., where the execution would take place.
A prisoner since age 19, Hammer killed Andrew Marti in 1996 by tying him to his bunk and strangling him with a braided bedsheet at the Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary in Pennsylvania.
Before the killing, Hammer had built a reputation as one of Oklahoma's most troublesome prisoners. He was sentenced to more than 1,200 years for a spree of kidnapping and attempted murder that followed his escape from prison in the early 1980s.
His misdeeds while in state prison included credit-card scams and a telephone bomb threat that shut down the Oklahoma Capitol. He once used a prison employee's credit card to send flowers to the warden.
Hammer pleaded guilty in 1998 to killing his cellmate. He initially refused to challenge an execution scheduled for January 1999, then changed his mind and allowed an appeal. He changed his mind again and asked to be executed as quickly as possible.
In July, Clinton, a death penalty supporter, postponed the execution of another federal inmate, Juan Raul Garza, until Dec. 12 so he could use new Justice Department procedures for seeking presidential clemency. In September, Garza, who is Hispanic, urged Clinton to commute his sentence to life in prison because of 'long-standing racial bias' in capital punishment sentencing.
Hundreds of people have been executed by states since the Supreme Court lifted a moratorium on the death penalty in 1976.
The last execution carried out by the federal government was 37 years ago, when Victor Feguer was hanged in Iowa for kidnapping and killing a doctor.