Steven Nelson has spent more than a dozen years on Death Row in Texas and is to be executed by lethal injection on Wednesday for the murder of a pastor that he insists he did not commit.

"It's hard at times," the 37-year-old Nelson said in an interview with AFP at the maximum-security prison in Livingston, a town 75 miles (120 kilometers) north of Houston, where he is awaiting his execution.

"You're waiting to be put to death," he said. "So that kind of breaks a little part of you every day... You just don't want to do nothing."

Nelson, who was wearing a white prison jumpsuit, spoke to AFP from a cubicle behind a glass partition and arrived for the interview in handcuffs, which were removed by prison guards and put back on when he departed.

Nelson was convicted of the 2011 murder of Clint Dobson, a 28-year-old pastor, during a robbery of the NorthPointe Baptist Church in Arlington, near Dallas.

Dobson was beaten and suffocated. Judy Elliott, the church secretary, was also badly beaten but survived.

Nelson's appeals against his........

© International Business Times