COLUMBIA, S.C. — The South Carolina Supreme Court has not yet set a date for the state’s ruling next execution after lawyers for four appeal prisoners asked them to delay deaths until after Christmas and New Year.
Judges typically issue notices on Fridays because this provides the maximum 28 days to prepare for the execution, which by law must be carried out on the “fourth Friday after receipt of such notice.”
The Supreme Court also pledged in August to spread out the executions five-week intervals to give prison staff and defense attorneys, who often represent multiple convicted prisoners, time to handle all necessary legal matters. That includes making sure lethal injection drugs, the electric chair and the firing squad are ready, as well as conducting investigations and last-minute appeals.
South Carolina’s death chamber is at a backlog due to a 13-year lull in executions, in part because the state could not obtain the drugs needed to perform lethal injections until the General Assembly passed a law renaming the provider secret.
Six prisoners no longer had a profession at that time. Two have been executed and four await their fate.
The judges could have ruled a death sentence last Friday for Marion Bowman Jr., which would have been performed on December 6.
But the day passed without any word from the Supreme Court, including what the justices thought of the prisoners’ request last Tuesday to delay the executions until early January.
“Six consecutive executions without a reprieve will take a significant toll on everyone involved, especially at a time of year that is so important for families,” attorneys for the inmates wrote in the lawsuits.
Attorneys for the state responded that prison officials were willing to stick to the original schedule and that the state had previously carried out executions around the Christmas and New Year’s holidays, including five between Dec. 4, 1998, and Jan. 8, 1999.
Bowman, 44, was convicted of murder in the shooting death of 21-year-old girlfriend Kandee Martin whose burned body was found in the trunk of her car in Dorchester County in 2001. Bowman has spent more than half his life on death row.
Bowman would be the third inmate executed since September, after the state obtained the drug needed to carry out the death sentence. Freddie Owens was put to death by lethal injection on September 20 and Richard Moore was executed on November 1
South Carolina was one of the busiest states for executions at the time, but that stopped when the state began having trouble obtaining lethal injection drugs due to drug companies’ concerns that they would have to reveal they had sold the drugs to officials.
The state Legislature has since passed a law allowing officials to keep suppliers of lethal injection drugs secret, and in July the state Supreme Court ruled cleared the way to restart performances.