By Associated Press
Montgomery AL – The Alabama Supreme Court has set an Oct. 25 execution date for Daniel Lee Siebert for the 1986 murders in Talladega of a deaf student and her two children.
The Supreme Court on Monday granted a petition from the Alabama Attorney General's office asking it set an execution date for the 53-year-old Siebert, who has been on death row for 20 years.
Siebert was sentenced to death for the Feb. 19, 1986 strangulation deaths of Sherri Weathers, 24, and her two sons, 5-year-old Chad and 4-year-old Joey.
Weathers was a student at the Alabama School for the Deaf in Talladega and had been dating Siebert. The bodies were found in her Talladega apartment several days after the three were killed.
Siebert was also convicted of capital murder in the death of Linda Jarman, a neighbor of Weathers, who was killed the same night.
Siebert was arrested six months later in Hurricane Mills, Tenn., following a manhunt in which police said he used several aliases and traveled to locations including Elizabethtown, Ky., Atlantic City, N.J., and New Kent County, Va.
Assistant Attorney General Clay Crenshaw said Siebert has exhausted all of his appeals for the killing of Weathers and her children.
Siebert has filed a federal lawsuit challenging Alabama's method of execution, lethal injection. In papers filed with the Supreme Court, the attorney general's office asked that Siebert's execution not be delayed because of the pending lawsuit.
In the lawsuit, Siebert claims that the way Alabama administers lethal injection could cause him severe pain. He also says in the lawsuit that he has been given a preliminary diagnosis that he suffers from hepatitis C and pancreatic cancer, which the suit says could cause complications with the lethal injection procedure.
Siebert's attorneys could not immediately be reached for comment.