South Carolina prepares for first execution in 13 years

COLUMBIA, SC – South Carolina is set to execute its first prisoner in 13 years, following an unintended pause when the state was unable to obtain the drugs needed for 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' final appeal was rejected, and his last chance to avoid the death penalty is if South Carolina's Republican governor, Henry McMaster, commutes his sentence to life in prison.

McMaster said he would follow historic tradition and announce his decision minutes before the lethal injection begins, when prison officials will call him and the attorney general to make sure there is no reason to delay the execution. The former prosecutor vowed to review Owens' clemency request but said he tends to trust prosecutors and juries.

Owens may be the first of several inmates to die in the state's death chamber, Broad River Correctional Institution. Five other inmates have not been appealed, and the South Carolina Supreme Court has cleared the possibility of one execution being carried out every five weeks.

South Carolina first attempted to use the firing squad to resume executions after supplies of lethal injection drugs ran out and no company was willing to sell them publicly. However, in order to reopen the death chamber, the state had to pass a secrecy law that kept the drug supplier and much of the execution protocol secret.

To carry out executions, the state switched from a three-drug method to a new protocol that uses only the sedative pentobarbital. The new procedure is similar to how the federal government kills inmates, state prison officials say.

Under South Carolina law, prisoners sentenced to death have the choice between lethal injection, the new firing squad, or the electric chair, invented in 1912. Owens left the decision about his manner of death to his lawyer. He said he felt that if he made that decision, he would be complicit in his own death, and his religious beliefs condemn 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 presented an affidavit from Steven Golden two days before the execution in which he said Owens was not at the store, contradicting his testimony at trial. 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.

The last execution in South Carolina took place in May 2011. It took a decade of execution controversy in the legislature—first allowing execution by firing squad as a death penalty and later passing a death penalty 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 inadvertent stay of executions, the number of people sentenced to death in South Carolina has declined. At the beginning of 2011, there were 63 condemned inmates in the state. As of Friday, there were 32. About 20 inmates have been released from death row after successful appeals and have received alternative sentences. Others have died of natural causes.