ANNAPOLIS, Md. (AP) – Lawyers for convicted killer Steven Oken will get what could be a last chance to delay his execution at a hearing scheduled Tuesday before the state Court of Appeals.

“It’s judgment day, in effect,” Fred Warren Bennett, Oken’s lawyer, said Monday after the court agreed to a hearing on his motions challenging the use of lethal injection as the method of execution.

Unless the appeals court intervenes, Oken is scheduled to die next week for the 1987 rape and murder of Dawn Marie Garvin, a 20-year-old Baltimore County woman. She was the first of three women Oken was convicted of killing in Maryland and Maine in 1987.

Oken was taken into custody in Freeport, Maine, the day after the murder of Lori Ward, a motel clerk in Kittery. He received a life sentence for that killing.

In his motion filed with the Court of Appeals, Bennett alleges that “due to the insufficiency of the execution protocols and training of execution team members, the killing of Steven Oken will amount to little more than torture.”

Oken’s lawyers allege that the state’s method of execution, which uses three separate drugs, inflicts unnecessary pain and suffering.

State officials say they are satisfied that the use of lethal injections provides a humane and painless method of execution. Mark Vernarelli, a spokesman for the Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services, said thousands of hours have been devoted to examining the procedure.

The state’s first execution by lethal injection was in 1994.

AP-ES-06-07-04 1953EDT