WASHINGTON International pressure is building on U.S. authorities to spare the life of 38-year-old Karla Faye Tucker, scheduled to die by lethal injection in Texas February 3. Tucker has been condemned to death for two grisly 1983 ax murders that she admits having committed. But she says she has since found God in her prison cell, has turned her life around, and should be given the chance to live.

I am no longer a continual threat to society, said Tucker in an interview on CNN this week, saying that she hoped a Texas judicial panel later this month will recommend a reprieve from the execution order. If there's a change for the positive and if it's proven and it's factual, why can't that be considered? asked Tucker, who married her pastor in prison.

Tucker is scheduled to be the first woman executed in the United States in 13 years, and the first in the state of Texas in 134 years. Texas is the U.S. state which has sent the greatest number of inmates to their deaths. Last year alone it executed some 37 prisoners. Since officials announced the date of her execution, a stream of television camera crews has filed into the Mountain View prison at Gatesville, Texas. But some victim support groups and law enforcement lobbies pushing for Tucker's execution point out the crime was a particularly heinous one, in which the victims pleaded in vain for their lives.

Others say the fact that Tucker is a woman is no reason to spare her. One of the reasons for the attention she is getting is definitely because she is a woman, said David Atwood, an official with the Texas Coalition Against the Death Penalty. But Atwood said the main issue, in his opinion, is the wrongheadedness of capital punishment, rather than Tucker's sex.

We're not looking at this as a gender issue so much as a person who appears to be totally rehabilitated, and why go for ... the execution of a person like this? he said, adding that the same principle applied for males on death row. Tucker's backers say that given her hard-knock life, it's no wonder she fell foul of the law.

Forced into prostitution at the age of 10 and addicted to drugs at an early age, she says she was also under the influence of drugs on the day when she and a male accomplice committed the murders. He also was given a death sentence, but has since died of an illness while in prison. A demonstration was planned Saturday in Austin, Texas, organized by a coalition of church groups, Amnesty International and anti-death penalty groups.

Two Amnesty International representatives, including Bianca Jagger (ex-wife of Rolling Stones singer Mick Jagger) are expected to meet with Tucker, the group said. A three-member delegation from the European Parliament is also planning to visit Tucker on January 26 and plead her case to Texas's Republican Governor George Bush (son of the former president), the anti-death penalty group Hands Off Cain announced in New York City. The European Parliament on Thursday urged Bush in a statement to either pardon Tucker or commute her death sentence.

Tucker's fate is in the hands of Bush, who has never yet reprieved a death row inmate. He is to receive a recommendation from an 18-member panel in the coming weeks. But officials said that in the past 20 years, the commission has not recommended such a reprieve. And not a single one of the 16 condemned inmates who petitioned for a pardon last year received one.

Experts agree that the chances that Tucker will beat the odds are slim. Unfortunately it will probably be a political decision more than anything else unless George Bush feels it is to his political advantage, which I doubt very much, said Dave Atwood. Tucker said that whatever the board decides, she is prepared to die for the brutal crime she committed more than a decade ago.

Whatever he wants to do with my life now, I'll walk with him, because it's causing the system to look at what they are doing, she said. (AFP)