A federal judge in Chattanooga has indicated he may stop the Feb. 7 execution of Gregory Thompson, the Tennessee death row inmate who confessed to the murder of Brenda Blanton Lane of Shelbyville 21 years ago.

U.S. District Court Judge R. Allan Edgar on Friday granted a request from Thompson's Knoxville-based attorney, Dana Hansen Chavis, noting that Thompson had only exhausted his opportunity for relief in the Tennessee courts.

Edgar is willing to consider more information in the case, but according to the sister of Thompson's victim, the execution could still be conducted Feb. 7.

Thompson was convicted in 1985 for the murder of Lane, then a 28-year-old former Shelbyville Times-Gazette reporter. Her sister, Barbara Brown of the Longview community, survives.

"It's a new deadline," Brown said Monday, referring to Edgar's call for more information in 30 days.

"It might not change the execution date because there are 30 days between Thursday (when Edgar signed his order) and Feb. 7," Brown said. "So, I was looking at it as a routine step."

Meanwhile, Brown maintains her position that Thompson should be executed.

"I would like to see this end," she said, agreeing that in her view the appropriate conclusion to the 21-year saga would be Thompson's execution.

Edgar previously postponed Thompson's Aug. 19, 2004 execution date. Six months ago, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a federal appeals court improperly reopened Thompson's case. That allowed Tennessee's Supreme Court to set the Feb. 7 date. Last month, that court refused to stop the execution.

Yet now, Edgar has agreed to consider information on whether the execution should happen.

"This is territory that's being revisited after being quiet for a couple of decades on the issue of insanity," said Randy Tatel, executive director of the Tennessee Coalition to Abolish State Killing.

The mental competency of an individual to be executed is the issue.

However, lawyers in the Tennessee Attorney Generals Office have pointed out that Tennessee's standard to determine whether an inmate is competent to be executed is whether they know that they're to be killed and why.

Those lawyers say Thompson knows he's to be executed because he was convicted of killing Lane. He used a rusty knife after abducting her from a Shelbyville Wal-Mart parking lot on Jan. 1, 1985 to get her car so he and his girlfriend could go to Marietta, Ga.

"There's always somebody who will come up with a theory on law that will prevent an execution from happening," Sheriff Clay Parker said Monday.

Chavis, an assistant federal community defender at the Federal Defender Services of Eastern Tennessee Inc., wants a hearing on whether Thompson is competent to be executed. She also asked that his execution be held in abeyance until a hearing was conducted.

Attorneys for the state opposed Chavis' request by arguing that the federal record on Thompson's sanity had not been supplemented with more evidence.

Edgar then wrote that apparently the state contends that Thompson's failure to provide more information permits the court to immediately dismiss any efforts to spare the convict's life without anything more than what's in the federal record.

Accordingly, Edgar ordered Thompson's defense team to provide any additional information that had been considered by Tennessee courts and to do so within 30 days of his order dated Thursday last week.

Through Thompson's co-counsel in Nashville, Michael Passino, and information from Dr. Faye Sultan who's written about Thompson's condition, Chavis has increased the size of his psychiatric file. It's now about 4,000 pages long and much of that will be new to Edgar. On Monday, she claimed state officials have medicated Thompson "to disguise his insanity and ... he should not be executed."

States should not execute people who are insane, she said.

That, says Tatel, the executive director of the Coalition to Abolish State Killing, is his group's point, but he explains the legal situation. Thompson's trial attorneys didn't use the insanity defense. Now, insanity is offered as a reason to set aside the death sentence.

"Is it an issue that can come back up?" Tatel asks.

Parker said, "It's gotten to the point where execution is practically nonexistent."

Prosecutors recognize the dilemma.

"Do you spend $1 million to give somebody the death penalty or maybe one tenth that to keep them in jail for the rest of their life?" the sheriff asked.

Thompson's insanity existed before he was convicted, his current defenders have said, claiming he left Shelbyville thinking the Ku Klux Klan was after him and that since his incarceration he's concluded that he can survive execution by electrocution because his TV shocks him when he touches it and he's "used to it."

TCASK also says Thompson believes his victim works at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution where he's held.

Since Thompson's conviction, "the state has submerged Greg in an ocean of anti-psychotic drugs," Chavis says. "Greg is medicated twice a day... The drugs the state is pouring into Greg cause chemically created behavior that masks his tortured insanity."

Without those drugs, Thompson would return to his insanity at the time of the murder, she said. Justice is better served by imprisoning Thompson forever to bring closure to the case and dedicating the state's scarce resources to other areas.