NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — An attorney for Tennessee death row inmate Edmund Zagorski says his choice of death by electrocution over lethal injection is not a ploy to buy time.

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Kelley Henry announced Zagorski’s decision Monday night. He’s scheduled to be executed Thursday.

Henry said some people will see the choice as a stall tactic, but Zagorski cannot legally challenge the use of the electric chair after choosing to die by that method.

Henry said Zagorski’s decision is based on evidence that Tennessee’s lethal injection method would cause him 10 to 18 minutes of mental and physical anguish. He believes the electric chair will be quicker.

“It was certainly a difficult decision,” Henry said. “It’s impossible to know which is better of the two unconstitutional choices.”

Zagorski is one of 32 death row inmates in Tennessee suing over the state’s preferred three-drug method of execution, claiming it violates the 8th Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. In the lawsuit, they claim the first drug, midazolam, which is supposed to render the prisoner unconscious and unable to feel pain, actually only leaves the prisoner unable to cry out as their lungs fill with fluid and they experience drowning, suffocation and chemical burning.

The Tennessee Supreme Court, in a split decision, ruled against the inmates Monday. Henry said she intends to ask for a stay of Zagorski’s execution in order to allow the U.S. Supreme Court time to review the merits of the lethal injection case. She said she will argue that the fact Zagorski has now chosen to die by the electric chair should not prevent the court from granting a stay because he was forced to make that choice as the lesser of two evils.

In Tennessee, death row inmates whose offenses came before January 1999 can choose either lethal injection or the electric chair. The last time Tennessee put someone to death by electrocution was in 2007.

A spokeswoman for the Tennessee Department of Correction did not immediately respond to messages asking whether the state will be ready to use the electric chair Thursday.

Gov. Bill Haslam already has said he won’t intervene in Zagorski’s case.