Tennessee death row inmate Harold Wayne Nichols will be executed by lethal injection after he declined on Monday to choose between the electric chair and the state’s preferred method. Nichols, convicted in 1990 for the rape and murder of 21-year-old student Karen Pulley, has a December 11 execution date.

Inmates convicted before January 1999 are permitted to choose electrocution, a method Nichols had selected for his originally scheduled 2020 execution, which was reprieved due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The electric chair has only been used five times in the U.S. over the past decade, all in Tennessee.

Nichols’ original choice for electrocution came amid concerns from inmates’ attorneys over the state’s previous, multi-drug lethal injection protocol.

An independent review in 2022, which

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