A death row inmate due to be executed on October 14 claims he’s too fat to be put to death, asserting that it would be very difficult for executioners to find his veins and that his weight could reduce the efficiency of one of the lethal injection drugs, as reported by the Associated Press.

Lawyers for the inmate, Richard Wade Cooey II, contend in a federal lawsuit that their client, who is 5-feet-7 tall and weighs 267 pounds, had poor veins when he faced execution five years ago and the problem has been aggravated even more by weight gain.

Furthermore, the lawsuit, filed on Friday in federal court, also claims prison officials have encountered difficulty when they had to draw blood from the inmate for medical procedures

Richard Cooey, 41, is sentenced to death for raping and murdering two young women in 1986. However, his attorneys say a drug their client has been taking in order to treat migraine headaches could have an effect on the execution process. The drug Topamax, a type of seizure medication, may have generated a resistance to thiopental, the drug used to sedate inmates before two other lethal drugs are administered, Dr. Mark Heath, a physician signed up by the Ohio Public Defender’s Office, informed in the documents filed with the court. In addition to this, Dr. Mark Heath says Richard Cooey’s weight, combined with the possible drug resistance, raises the risk he would not be appropriately anesthetized.

Moreover, Cooey’s public defender, Kelly Culshaw Schneider, said on Monday that all specialists concur in what concerns the fact that if the first drug does not have a proper effect, “the execution is going to be excruciating.”