For the first time in two years, South Carolina authorities plan to execute a convicted inmate. Upstate native Jeffrey Motts, 35, is scheduled to die by lethal injection at 6 p.m. today at the Broad River Correctional Institution in Columbia.

He was serving two life sentences after being convicted of the murder of his great aunt and her husband during a robbery at their Spartanburg County home in 1995. His death penalty conviction came more than a decade later, after the 35-year-old inmate was found guilty of the 2005 killing of his cellmate.

A cocktail of three drugs will be used in the execution. Those drugs, in order, induce unconsciousness, cause paralysis and stop the heart.

The first drug, for unconsciousness, is typically sodium thiopental; it is used in South Carolina and most other lethal injection states. But federal agents seized South Carolina’s supply of the drug last month as part of a nationwide investigation into how prisons obtained the drug.

The only U.S. producer of sodium thiopental stopped production in January and overseas producers had ceased sales to the U.S. before January. The last U.S.-made supplies would expire by the end of 2011, according to manufacturer Hospira.

The Independent Mail reported in that the South Carolina Department of Corrections had no plans to use a drug other than sodium thiopental for the first stage.

In place of sodium thiopental, today’s execution would use pentobarbital, which is a surgical sedative that is sometimes employed in assisted suicides and is more commonly used to destroy dogs and cats.

Motts has waived any appeals, corrections spokesman John Barkley told the Independent Mail.

Barkley referred questions about whether the governor would intervene to that office, but said that since Motts had actively avoided appeals and publicly has welcomed his execution, the penalty is expected to be completed today.

Motts’ last meal will be given between 3:30 p.m. and 4 p.m., Barkley said.

Independent Mail coverage partner WSPA News Channel 7 will have a reporter witnessing the planned execution. Channel 7 has reported that Motts was given the choice of the electric chair or injection, and he chose injection.

South Carolina requires the state Supreme Court to sign off on an execution one month before it happens. There are 55 convicted people, including Motts, on the state’s death row. The last person executed by the state was in May 2009.