Advocates from several organizations that oppose the death delivered a petition to Gov. Kay Ivey on Tuesday opposing the execution of Jamie Ray Mills, which is scheduled for Thursday.

Mills is scheduled to die by lethal injection for the murders of Floyd and Vera Hill during a robbery in Marion County in 2004. The execution is scheduled for 6 p.m. at Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore.

Along with the petition opposing Mills’ execution, the advocates delivered two related petitions. One opposes Alabama’s new method of execution, nitrogen hypoxia, as experimental. The third petition seeks greater transparency in Alabama’s execution process.

The group Death Penalty Action, which supports abolishing the death penalty, organized Tuesday’s event, which included brief remarks from several speakers on the Capitol steps before the petitions were carried in to the governor’s office. The rallies and petition deliveries have become regular events during the weeks of Alabama executions. Project Hope to Abolish the Death Penalty and Witness to Innocence were among other organizations with representatives at the Capitol on Tuesday.

Mills and his then-wife, JoAnn Mills, were convicted in the June 2004 beating deaths of the Hills. The elderly couple were beaten with a machete, a ball-peen hammer, and a tire iron at their home in Guin. The Mills stole cash and prescription medication, according to the court records.

The petition seeking clemency for Mills cites claims Mills made in federal court in April – that JoAnn Mills testified against her husband back in 2007 as part of a plea deal that the prosecutor failed to disclose in court. JoAnn Mills, originally charged with capital murder, pleaded guilty to murder and received a sentence of life in prison with the possibility of parole.

But U.S. District Judge Scott Coogler rejected Mills’ claim in a ruling on May 17, saying Mills’ lawyers had made the same claim about a plea deal many times without evidence and finding that a new affidavit from JoAnn Mills’ lawyer was filed too late and was unconvincing. The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that decision on Tuesday.

The petition seeking clemency for Mills has received more than 6,600 signatures, according to the online post on the Action Network.

Abraham Bonowitz, executive director of Death Penalty Action, said the assertion about the plea deal raises questions about whether justice was done in the case.

Aside from that, Bonowitz said sentences of life in prison without the possibility of parole achieve justice more than the death penalty.

“We believe that we can be safe from dangerous people who have done awful things,” Bonowitz said. “They are no longer a danger in prison. And we can hold them accountable by throwing away the key which is what we do in the vast majority of cases. We do not need executions to hold people accountable to their wrongs or to be safe from them.

“So let’s get rid of the death penalty, and instead put the money that we’re wasting into better services for victim families, and better prevention efforts. Because we know one of the constant threads throughout everybody that gets executed, is what happened to them when they were children. We’re talking about abuse, addiction, all kind of issues like that, from the time of their childhood. If we could intervene in situations like that more and better, we would prevent murders.”

The claim alleging the state’s failure to disclose a plea deal is one two federal lawsuits Mills filed as part of his latest round of appeals. The other challenges the state’s lethal injection protocol. Last week, Chief U.S. District Judge Emily Marks of Montgomery denied Mills’ motion on the lethal injection protocol and called the timing of the case so close to the execution date “inexplicable and inexcusable.”

The 11th Circuit upheld Marks’ decision on Tuesday, denying Mills’ motion for a stay of execution.

The execution would be Alabama’s second of the year. The state executed Kenneth Eugene Smith by the new method of nitrogen hypoxia in January. Smith’s execution was the first by any state using that method.

More than 21,000 people have signed the petition seeking to stop nitrogen hypoxia executions, which cause death by suffocating a person who breathes only nitrogen, with no oxygen. The petition says “non-government witnesses” described Smith’s execution as horrific and torturous. Attorney General Steve Marshall said the execution went according to plan and called it a “textbook” success.

Witnesses said Smith writhed and thrashed for about two minutes after the gas was started. That was followed by five to seven minutes of heavy breathing. Witnesses said Smith stopped moving about 12 minutes after the gas was started. He was pronounced dead about a half-hour after the gas started.

Gary Drinkard, an exonerated former Alabama Death Row inmate, who spoke on the Capitol steps Tuesday, said the length of time it took Smith to die shows that the execution did not go as planned. Drinkard, who is on the board of directors of the organization Witness to Innocence, said claims of prosecutorial misconduct in the Mills case and others call for the establishment of a conviction integrity unit in Alabama, either by the governor or the attorney general. Drinkard later delivered one of the petitions to the governor’s office.

Rev. Lynn Hopkins of the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Montgomery spoke in the Capitol steps in favor of the “pull back the curtains on executions” petition. It calls for the media and witnesses to be allowed to observe executions from the moment the condemned inmate is brought into the execution chamber and the procedure begins.

“If the state is going to kill people in the name of justice, ostensibly as representatives of its citizens, we are demanding that its citizens have knowledge of what’s going on,” Hopkins said. “Right now, all of the preparation is done in secret. We have no knowledge of the source of the implements of killing. We have no knowledge of what goes on prior to the curtain being opened after the procedure has already begun.

“And regardless of how the citizens of Alabama feel about the death penalty, whether it can ever be just or not, certainly we are entitled to know exactly what the state of Alabama is doing in our name.”

Esther Brown, executive director of Project Hope to Establish the Death Penalty, also spoke and took part in Tuesday’s petition delivery.

“There may be one thing that I agree with the governor about,” Brown said. “All life is sacred. Unfortunately, I guess it depends on the life.”

The governor’s office did not respond to a request for comment about the petitions.

Bonowitz said that although the petitions are graciously received by the governor’s constituent services staff, his organization has never received a response from the governor’s office.