Death Row inmate George Del Vecchio says he's too sick to be executed.

The 47-year-old Chicagoan, scheduled to die Nov. 22 at Stateville Correctional Center near Joliet, has asked the Illinois Supreme Court to delay his lethal injection on grounds that he isn't "fit" to be executed, as state law requires. Del Vecchio is in a Downstate prison hospital being treated for an Oct. 26 heart attack.

Unless Del Vecchio's condition significantly worsens, his strategy is unlikely to prevail, legal experts said Thursday. But his petition nonetheless has focused attention on the legal, moral and philosophical arguments that surround capital punishment.

It also has brought to light the ironic practice of Illinois and other states, which work diligently to nurse sick Death Row inmates back to health to execute them as soon as they have recovered.

After Del Vecchio filed his legal motion Wednesday, prison officials sent him back to his cell at the Menard Correctional Center in Chester, said Jed Stone, Del Vecchio's lawyer.

But Thursday night, Del Vecchio was back in the prison hospital after complaining of chest pains, said Nic Howell, a spokesman for the Illinois Department of Corrections.

Stone maintains that his client is too sick to understand the gamut of last-minute appeals available to him.

"I can't communicate with my client," Stone said. "It's hard enough talking with a client on Death Row. But try talking to a drugged client chained to a hospital bed receiving morphine."

Condemned inmates generally are not spared the death penalty because of physical infirmities, legal experts said.

The practice of healing physically ill inmates and then executing them reached what many regarded as the height of irony this year. An Oklahoma prisoner tried to kill himself on the day of his execution, but he was revived at a hospital and then put to death.

Suicide attempts are common among Death Row inmates, said Frank Zimring, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley and a leading death-penalty expert. Prison officials always attempt to save inmates' lives so executions can be carried out.

Rather than arguing physical infirmities, inmates are more likely to stave off the executioner by contending that they are mentally incompetent.

By doing this, they appeal to the many protections in state and federal law designed to ensure that inmates understand what is happening to them throughout the criminal-justice process, even to the point at which the state puts them to death.

But it also is unusual for appeals alleging insanity to succeed, experts said. By the time inmates get to Death Row, all have been deemed fit to stand trial or to enter a guilty plea. The standard for determining fitness at trial also is much higher than during an appeal of a death sentence.

Inmates are considered unfit to be executed if, because of a mental condition, they can't understand the nature and purpose of capital punishment, said Arleen Anderson, chief of the criminal appeals bureau for the Illinois attorney general's office.

Anderson and others said challenges to mental fitness are rare because they are so difficult to prove.

"Even if you have a defendant who actually has some sort of mental deficiency-even in that situation-it's difficult to prove the defendant actually unfit to be executed," Anderson said.

Prosecutors, lawyers and law school professors said they knew of no case in which an Illinois Death Row inmate successfully appealed a capital sentence on grounds of physical or mental unfitness.

Another inmate on Illinois' Death Row, Guinevere Garcia, has given up her appeals and wants to be put to death. But her scheduled September execution was postponed while authorities determined whether she was mentally fit to give up her right to appeal.

Since then, a DuPage County judge has found her mentally fit, and she is scheduled to be executed Jan. 17.

Like most Death Row inmates, Del Vecchio is filing a flurry of last-minute appeals to try to spare his life. But his most recent filing is an example of how far some condemned inmates go to try to fend off the executioner.

A Washington inmate even argued that he was too fat to be hanged, saying he surely would be decapitated by the hangman's noose, which would constitute cruel and unusual punishment. His execution was delayed for other reasons.

Many others also have tried to beat the state to killing them by committing suicide.

"The whole area is just chock-full of ironies," Zimring said.

Nancy Bothne, Midwest regional director for Amnesty International USA, said: "This whole notion is extremely vulgar that we of this society try to save an individual's life on Death Row so that we can kill him."

But in Illinois and other states, prison authorities are mandated to provide medical help to sick inmates.

Some argue, however, that it would be contrary to the U.S. system of justice to let inmates kill themselves or let them be killed by an angry mob outside a courthouse.

"We are deprived of something very valuable when a criminal escapes punishment, even if he does so by dying," wrote Walter Berns, a political scientist and author of "For Capital Punishment."

Del Vecchio was sentenced to death for killing a 6-year-old Northwest Side boy in 1977. In the same incident, he sexually assaulted the boy's mother.