A convicted sex offender facing execution for raping and strangling a Clemson University student feels so guilty for his crimes that life in prison would be harder on him, his lawyer argued in a South Carolina court on Monday.

Jerry Buck Inman, 37, of Tennessee, pleaded guilty last month to murdering 20-year-old engineering student Tiffany Marie Souers in May 2006 in her apartment about three miles from the South Carolina college's campus. A judge will decide whether Inman is executed or sentenced to life in prison.

"He is filled with guilt and shame," Inman's attorney Jim Bannister said. "That eats him from the inside out on a daily basis. ... It leads him to the conclusion that he is an animal and that he deserves to die."

But Bannister argued during the first day of the sentencing hearing that his client should not be executed. He said Inman "came into this world impaired to start with," living in a home where his father molested him and his mother suffered from mental illness.