COLUMBIA, SC (AP) — South Carolina is about to execute its first inmate in 13 years after an unintentional interruption because the state did not have the necessary drugs for the lethal injections.
Freddie Eugene Owens, 46, is scheduled to die in a Columbia prison shortly after 6 p.m. on Friday. He was convicted in 1997 of murdering an employee who was unable to open the safe at a Greenville supermarket.
Owens’ last appeals were disputedHis last chance to escape death is for South Carolina’s Republican governor, Henry McMaster, to commute his sentence to life imprisonment.
McMaster said he would follow historical tradition and announce his decision minutes before the lethal injection is scheduled to begin, when prison officials will call him and the attorney general to make sure there is no reason to delay the execution. The former prosecutor promised to review Owens’ case. Petition for clemency However, he said he tends to trust prosecutors and juries.
Owens may be the first of several inmates to die in the state’s death chamber at Broad River Correctional Institution. Five other inmates have lost appeals, and the South Carolina Supreme Court has cleared the way to carry out an execution every five weeks.
South Carolina initially tried to Troop to resume executions after the supply of drugs for lethal injections was exhausted and no company was willing to sell them publicly. But the state had to Shield Law Keeping the drug supplier and large parts of the execution protocol secret in order to be able to reopen the death chamber.
To carry out executions, the state switched from a three-drug method to a new protocol that uses only the sedative PentobarbitalThe new procedure is similar to the way the federal government kills inmates, state prison officials say.
Under South Carolina law, convicted prisoners have the choice between lethal injection, the new firing squad, or the electric chair, built in 1912. Owens allowed his lawyer to choose how he diedand said he felt that if he made this decision he would be complicit in his own death and that his religious beliefs were not against suicide.
While in prison, Owens changed his name to “Khalil Divine Black Sun Allah,” but he is still referred to as Owens in court and prison records.
Owens was convicted of the murder of Irene Graves in 1999. But another murder looms over his case: After his conviction, but before he was sentenced for Graves’ murder, Owens fatally attacked a fellow prison inmate, Christopher Lee.
Owens gave a detailed confession about stabbing Lee, burning his eyes, choking him and stomping on him. According to an investigator’s written report, he concluded by saying he did it “because I had been wrongly convicted of murder.”
This confession was read to every jury and judge who subsequently sentenced Owens to death. Two of Owens’ death sentences were overturned on appeal, but he ended up on death row again.
Owens was charged with Lee’s murder but never brought to trial. Prosecutors dropped the charges, with the right to refile them in 2019, around the time Owens ran out of regular appeal options.
In his final appeal, Owens’ lawyers argued that prosecutors never presented scientific evidence that Owens pulled the trigger in Graves’s killing. The main evidence against him was a co-defendant who pleaded guilty and testified that Owens was the killer.
Owens’ lawyers filed a statutory declaration Two days before the execution, Steven Golden said Owens was not at the store, contradicting his testimony in court. Prosecutors said other friends of Owens and his ex-girlfriend testified that he had bragged about killing the clerk.
“South Carolina is on the brink of executing a man for a crime he did not commit. We will continue to advocate for Mr. Owens,” attorney Gerald “Bo” King said in a statement.
Owens’ lawyers also said he was only 19 years old at the time of the murder and suffered brain damage from physical and sexual abuse in juvenile detention.
The organization South Carolinians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty is planning a vigil outside the prison about 90 minutes before the anniversary of Owens’ death.
South Carolina’s last execution was in May 2011. It took a decade of back and forth in Parliament – first adding the firing squad as a method and later passing a protection law – before the death penalty was reinstated.
South Carolina has executed 43 inmates since the death penalty was reinstated in the United States in 1976. In the early 2000s, the state averaged three executions per year. Only nine states have recorded more executions.
But since the accidental pause in executions, the number of people sentenced to death in South Carolina has declined. At the beginning of 2011, there were 63 condemned prisoners in the state. At the beginning of Friday, there were 32. About 20 prisoners were taken from death row and received different prison sentences after successful appeals. Others died of natural causes.
