U.S. Supreme Court

Patrick Kennedy was spared from execution in 2008 but remained convicted in the 1998 rape of an 8-year-old. He is serving a life sentence.

In 2013, a federal judge in New Orleans agreed with defense lawyers who said there had been gender discrimination in the selection of grand jury leaders at the time Kennedy was indicted.

But the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals disagreed in a decision released Wednesday evening.

But a detective who helped break the case scoffed at the appeal Monday, saying Roderick Nunley should have been put to death long ago.

Nunley and a co-defendant were accused of kidnapping Ann Harrison as she waited for a school bus in Kansas City, then raping and killing the girl in 1989. If the courts don't step in, the 50-year-old Nunley will be lethally injected at 6 p.m. Tuesday and become the sixth inmate executed this year in Missouri.

The justices turned down an appeal from Lopez's attorneys who disregarded both his desire to die and lower court rulings that Lopez was competent to make that decision. 

The brief three-sentence order was issued about five hours before Lopez could be taken to the death chamber in Huntsville for lethal injection.

Investigators later determined that Cecelia Schneider was beaten and stabbed before her body, and the bed where she was found, was set on fire at her home in Tyler. Her missing car was found later that day, wrecked and abandoned.

Clifton Lamar Williams, a 21-year-old former fast food restaurant worker and cocaine user, was arrested about a week later after investigators found his fingerprint and blood inside the car. He had been dating a woman who lived a few doors away from Schneider's home.

A three-judge panel with the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Tuesday declined without comment David Zink's claims that the death penalty is unconstitutional.