COLUMBIA, SC — Tuesday, the South Carolina Supreme Court said it would not stop the execution of Freddie Owens. He is scheduled to die by lethal injection next week, which will be the first execution in 13 years in the state.
Two requests from defense lawyers were thrown out by all nine justices. The lawyers said the court needed to hear new information about what they called a “secret deal” that kept a co-defendant from going to death row or life in prison, and they also wanted to know more about a juror who thought Owens was wearing a stun belt at his 1999 trial.
The evidence and the argument that Owens’ death sentence was too harsh because the jury could not say for sure that he fired the shot that killed the convenience store clerk were not “exceptional circumstances” that would allow Owens to make another appeal, the justices wrote in their order.
It’s not easy to get new trials after people on death row have used up all of their options. Owens’ defenders said that his case had been carefully looked over by other lawyers, but this only came up in interviews as the time for his death got closer.
Owens will still be put to death on September 20 at the Broad River Correctional Institution in Columbia, as planned by the order.
South Carolina last put someone to death in May 2011. The state didn’t mean to stop executions, but its stock of drugs for lethal injection ran out, and companies wouldn’t sell it more if the deal became public.
The Legislature had to argue for ten years before the death penalty could be used again. First, the firing squad was added as a way, and then a shield law was passed.
Owens was given the death penalty for killing Irene Graves, a clerk at a Greenville convenience store in 1997. He is 46 years old. Steven Golden, another suspect, said Owens shot Graves in the head because she couldn’t open the safe.
There was a security video in the shop, but it wasn’t a good picture of the shooting. At Owens’ trial, prosecutors never found the weapon used and didn’t show any scientific proof linking Owens to the killing. However, after Owens’ death sentence was overturned, they showed that the person who killed the clerk was wearing a ski mask while the other person who robbed the store was wearing a stocking mask. The ski mask was also linked to Owens.
Court records show that Golden got 28 years in jail after pleading guilty to a lesser charge of voluntary manslaughter.
At Owens’ trial, Golden said that there was no deal to shorten his punishment. In a sworn statement signed on August 22, Golden said that he made a deal with the prosecutors. Owens’ lawyers said that this could have made juries not believe what he said.
In its order, the state Supreme Court said that wasn’t strong enough to stop Owens’ execution. They also said that the proof that Owens killed the clerk, even if he didn’t kill her, wasn’t strong enough to stop his death.
“He was an important part of the murder and armed robbery, and he showed a shocking lack of care for human life by knowingly committing a crime with a high risk of death,” the judges wrote.
Owens has one more chance to stay alive. Owens can only get his term cut from life in prison by Gov. Henry McMaster.
As has always been done, the governor has said he will not make his choice public until prison officials call him from the death chamber minutes before the execution. McMaster told reporters that he hasn’t decided what to do about Owens’ case yet, but as a former prosecutor, he accepts what the jury decides.
McMaster said, “When the law has been followed, there is only one answer.”
Around 8 a.m. Thursday, people who are against the death penalty gathered outside of McMaster’s office to ask him to be the first South Carolina governor to commute a sentence since the death penalty was reinstated in the U.S. in 1976.
The head of South Carolinians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, the Rev. Hillary Taylor, said, “There is always hope.” “No one is beyond being saved.” “You are more than the worst thing you’ve ever done.”
Taylor and others pointed out that Owens is Black in a state where a high number of people who have been put to death are Black. Owens was 19 years old when he killed the clerk.
“No one should kill.” Not even South Carolina. “Only God can do that,” the NAACP’s Rev. David Kennedy said.