Columbia, South Carolina — A condemned man forced to pick how he will be executed ended weeks of speculation by delegating the decision to his lawyer, who reluctantly advised South Carolina prison officials on Friday to prepare for a lethal injection rather than the electric chair or firing squad.
Freddie Owens stated in court documents that selecting the method of execution would play an active role in his death, and his Muslim faith teaches him that suicide is sinful.
Attorney Emily Paavola submitted the form to prison officials and issued a statement, stating that she is still concerned whether prison officials have disclosed enough information regarding the medicine to ensure that it will kill him without causing terrible anguish or agony, which might be considered cruel and unusual punishment.
“I’ve known Mr. Owens for fifteen years. I made the best judgment I could on his behalf given the circumstances and the knowledge available to me at the time. “I sincerely hope that the South Carolina Department of Corrections’ assurances are true,” she wrote.
If Owens’ counsel had not made a choice, state law would have sentenced him to the electric chair. Owens had stated that he did not want to die that way.
Owens’ execution is now scheduled for September 20, as South Carolina employs a new lethal injection process following a 13-year hiatus in executions.
Since 2011, executions in South Carolina have been postponed due to shortages of the lethal injection medication. The death chamber was reopened when lawmakers opted last year to keep the source of the sedative pentobarbital secret, and the state Supreme Court declared that the electric chair and firing squad were also legitimate methods of execution.
The state formerly used three medicines for executions, but switched to a single dose of pentobarbital — comparable to the federal government’s technique — to make getting it easier.
Owens and five other inmates have completed their appeals, and the justices have set a schedule for prospective executions every fifth Friday through 2025.
Attorneys for Owens, 46, have filed many legal motions since his execution date was set two weeks ago, but no delays have occurred.
The state Supreme Court has yet to rule on Owens’ request to postpone his execution so that his lawyers can argue that his co-defendant lied about having a deal to avoid the death penalty or a life sentence in exchange for testifying that Owens pulled the trigger to kill clerk Irene Graves after she struggled to open the safe in a store they were robbing in 1997.
The store’s camera did not clearly indicate who killed Graves, and scientific evidence was not offered during the trial. Prosecutors said the co-defendant’s testimony was supported by Owens confessing to the homicide to his mother, girlfriend, and police.
State attorneys stated that the issue of whether a juror was biased against Owens after seeing a bulge and correctly assuming it was a stun belt under Owens’ clothes has been addressed in a half-dozen appeals and two additional sentencing hearings, both of which resulted in a recommendation of death after other judges overturned his initial punishment.
“Owens has had numerous opportunities to file challenges about his conviction and imprisonment. “He is no longer due,” the South Carolina Attorney General’s Office stated in a court filing.
Owens’ lawyers are also requesting that his death sentence be suspended, at least temporarily, because he was 19 years old when the clerk was slain and scans of his brain revealed that it was not completely matured. They further claimed that a jury was never asked to decide whether Owens killed Graves alone, and that his sentence is excessive given that less than 1% of murder convictions during an armed robbery result in death.
Owens also attempted to postpone his execution by claiming that the state did not provide enough information regarding the drug.
When the state Supreme Court affirmed the new shield statute, it required prison officials to make a sworn affidavit stating the pentobarbital to be used in the state’s new lethal injection protocol is stable, pure, and potent enough to kill, based on similar methods in other jurisdictions.
Corrections Director Bryan Stirling stated that technicians from the State Law Enforcement Division laboratory analyzed two vials of the sedative and told him that the medications met the criteria. He offered no more facts, according to the rules of the shield law.
Owens’ lawyers requested more information, including the full lab result, the expiration date of the presumably compounded medicine, and how it would be maintained. In their court documents, they supplied a photo of a syringe of an execution medication from 2015 in Georgia that crystallized due to improper storage.
The South Carolina Supreme Court ruled late Thursday that prison officials had released enough information, siding with their lawyers who said any additional information could be “puzzle pieces” that allow death penalty opponents to figure out who provided the drug and pressure them not to sell it to the prison system again.
Regardless of what happens in court, Owens has one last option to save his life. In South Carolina, only the governor has the authority to give mercy and commute a death sentence to life in prison.
However, no governor has done so throughout the state’s 43 executions since the capital sentence was reinstated in the United States in 1976.
Gov. Henry McMaster has stated that he will follow longstanding tradition and not reveal his choice until prison officials make a call from the death chamber minutes before execution.