"I believe it's finally going to be over. I'm getting myself prepared to be done and get it over with," Marco Allen Chapman told The Associated Press.

Defense attorneys this week asked the state Supreme Court to stay the 36-year-old's execution, set for Nov. 21. Even though Chapman dismissed his lawyers in 2004 before pleading guilty to murder, public defenders have continued to file motions on his behalf, questioning his competency.

Attorneys have also filed motions arguing that he shouldn't be put to death until appeals are exhausted in a separate case questioning Kentucky's execution protocol. That case is pending before the state Supreme Court.

Chapman has been found competent three times. He has sued public defenders, seeking an order to stop them from filing additional appeals. He says he wants to be executed for murdering 6-year-old Cody Sharon and 7-year-old Chelbi Sharon in the northern Kentucky town of Warsaw in August 2002.

The Kentucky Attorney General's office asked the state's high court on Tuesday to call off any more competency tests and allow Chapman to be executed.

If the lethal injection goes forward, he would become the first Kentucky inmate put to death since 1999.

Chapman remains hopeful that the court proceedings are swiftly concluded and says he's sorting through what could be the final details of his life.

"We're still working on things, like what to do with my remains," Chapman said.

In a television ad this week, Dole questioned the Christian credentials of Democratic challenger Kay Hagan. The state senator responded angrily, filing a lawsuit on Thursday and airing an ad of her own that says Dole is breaking the Bible's Ninth Commandment by bearing false witness.

The two candidates are locked in one of the nation's closest Senate races. An Associated Press-GfK poll released this week found Hagan has a slight edge. The pair has spent months swapping negative ads, but even some Republicans think Dole's assertions about Hagan and her faith have gone too far.

"It's pretty risky," said Republican political consultant Carter Wrenn, who worked for the late Jesse Helms, the senator Dole replaced in Washington six years ago. "Anytime you start questioning somebody's religion, you're getting on thin ice."

Dole was once considered such a sure thing that Democrats struggled to recruit a challenger for a Senate seat that has been in Republican hands for 35 years. But a surge in Democratic registrations and excitement surrounding the party's presidential nominee Barack Obama have boosted Hagan's campaign.

Dole's 30-second advertisement shows clips of some members of an atheist advocacy group — the Godless Americans Political Action Committee — talking about some of their goals, such as taking "under God" out of the Pledge of Allegiance and removing "In God We Trust" from U.S. currency. It goes on to question why Hagan went to a fundraiser at the home of a man who serves as an adviser to the group.

"Godless Americans and Kay Hagan. She hid from cameras. Took Godless money. What did Hagan promise in return?" the narrator says.

The ad ends with a picture of Hagan while another woman declares in the background, "There is no God!"

Hagan is a Presbyterian church elder who teaches Sunday school. On Wednesday, her attorneys demanded the ad come down within 24 hours. On Thursday, Hagan's attorneys filed a lawsuit in Wake County Superior Court accusing Dole of defamation and libel.

"Each airing of the advertisement further injures (Hagan's) good name and reputation in the community," Hagan's attorneys wrote in court documents. Thursday's court filing does not detail Hagan's full case against Dole, but allows Hagan 20 days to file the full complaint.

Dole's campaign says the ad does not question Hagan's faith, only her agenda and associations, and attorneys for Dole said in a letter to Hagan's legal team that the ad was factual. Dan McLagan, a Dole spokesman, said the campaign had no plans to pull the ad from the air and dismissed the lawsuit as a "silly political gimmick."

"This lawsuit is frivolous and we will file a motion to dismiss," he said. "Kay Hagan knows that the Dole campaign ad is accurate and she is trying to confuse voters until Election Day."

Hagan responded Thursday with an 30-second spot of her own. Referring to the Ninth Commandment in the Old Testament, Hagan says the campaign is about creating jobs and fixing the economy, "not bearing false witness against fellow Christians."

"Elizabeth Dole's attacks on my Christian faith are offensive," Hagan says in the ad. "She even faked my voice in her TV ad to make you think I don't believe in God. Well, I believe in God. I taught Sunday School. My faith guides my life, and Sen. Dole knows it."

The editorial board of The Charlotte Observer, the state's largest newspaper, compared Dole's ad to an infamous spot run in 1990 by Helms against challenger Harvey Gantt, who is black. That ad showed a pair of white hands crumpling a rejection letter, while a narrator slammed "racial quotas."

Wrenn, who helped write the so-called "hands" ad, said both ads were probably put together under similar circumstances.

"When you get down into the 11th hour of a campaign, the pressure gets up pretty high, and your sleep deprivation factor gets up pretty high," Wrenn said. "Sometimes you just lose your judgment a little bit."

At issue is language in a drug labeling rule from 2006 that effectively limits when people can sue in state court over injury claims involving medications. The FDA contends federal regulations prevail when there is a conflict with state law. This concept is called pre-emption.

Internal agency documents showed that career officials opposed this approach, according to a report released by Rep. Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. In the past, the agency had viewed private suits as an additional layer of protection against unsafe drugs, the report said.

"Much of the argument for why we are proposing to invoke pre-emption seems to be based on a false assumption that the FDA approved labeling is fully accurate and up-to-date in a real time basis," the report quoted Dr. John Jenkins, who oversees FDA's new drug reviews, as saying. "We know that such an assumption is false."

Marco Allen Chapman's execution was scheduled for Nov. 21 after the Kentucky Supreme Court upheld his sentence last week. Chapman, 36, would be the first inmate put to death in the state in nearly 10 years.

The defense attorneys filed two motions with the Supreme Court on Monday asking for a stay of execution, even though Chapman dismissed them in 2004 before pleading guilty and asking to be put to death.

The public defenders questioned Chapman's competency in one motion for a stay. In another, they argued that Chapman shouldn't be executed until appeals are exhausted in a separate case that questions the validity of Kentucky's execution protocol. That case is pending before the state Supreme Court.

Public defenders Donna Boyce, Randall Wheeler and Emily Rhorer wrote in one of the motions that Chapman "will suffer the most irreparable injury known to law" if the stay isn't granted. "He will be executed before it is determined whether his execution would be legal," they wrote.

The law is designed to keep sex offenders away from children by monitoring how close they live to schools, parks and other spots where kids gather. But critics say it unfairly subjects homeless offenders to a life sentence if they fail to register a home address.

The Georgia Supreme Court's 6-1 decision Monday found the law's registration requirements were "unconstitutionally vague." The opinion also held that homeless offenders are not exempt from the statute, and suggested special reporting requirements for the homeless.

The case involves William James Santos, a homeless man and convicted sex offender who was kicked out of a Gainesville homeless shelter in July 2006 and was arrested three months later on charges he failed to register with Georgia's sex offender list.

Police in Warwick said Dennis Ricca died Oct. 17 of a single gunshot wound to the head. The 55-year-old was found behind the wheel of his pickup truck in the driveway of his summer home in Greenwood Lake, about 50 miles northwest of Manhattan. A 9 mm handgun was by his side.

Ricca was found three days after he and Leno were sued by the estate of Macy's department store heir John W. Straus. The lawsuit, filed in state Supreme Court in Manhattan, accuses them of knowingly buying valuable cars after an improper auction rigged to wrest the vehicles from Straus when he was ill.

Court papers said Leno paid $180,000 for a 1931 Duesenberg that was worth $1.2 million, and Ricca bought a 1930 Rolls Royce for an unknown amount. The cars were worth a total of $1.7 million and had been in the Straus family for 75 years, court papers say.

The lawsuit said parking garage owner Garage Management Corp. claimed it auctioned the long-stored cars to satisfy unpaid bills, although they actually had been paid. Ricca was the company's director of maintenance at the Upper East Side garage where the two cars were parked.