South Carolina Supreme Court to decide minimum time between executions
The South Carolina Supreme Court will not allow any new executions in the state until a minimum amount of time is set between sending prisoners to the execution chamber.
The state’s next execution, scheduled for September 20, is still scheduled for inmate Freddie Eugene Owens. It would be the first execution in South Carolina in more than 13 years after the court cleared the way to reopen the execution chamber last month.
But in setting Owens’ execution date Friday, the court also agreed to hear a request from four other death row inmates who have exhausted their appeals to require the state to wait at least three months between executions.
Currently, the Supreme Court can space executions as close together as a week. That accelerated schedule would burden prison staff, who must take extensive steps to put an inmate to death, and could lead to botched executions, an attorney for the inmates wrote in court documents.
This also puts a strain on lawyers trying to represent multiple inmates on death row, attorney Lindsey Vann said.
State attorneys have until early September to respond.
South Carolina has carried out executions in quick succession before. Two half-brothers were put to death in one night in December 1998. More executions followed on the next two Fridays that month, and two more in January 1999.
Owens46, has until the end of next week to decide whether he wants to die by lethal injection, electrocution or the firing squad. His lawyers say he is awaiting an affidavit from prison officials this week about the purity, potency and quality of the lethal injection drug, under the terms of a new state law that limits the amount of information about execution proceedings that can be released and whether the law satisfies both state and federal courts.
The last execution in South Carolina took place in 2011. Since then, the three drugs the state used to kill inmates have expired and prison officials can no longer obtain them.
Nasty restart executionslawmakers changed the protocol for lethal injections to allow only one drug and added the firing squad.
“Executions scheduled close to the deadline would pose a high risk of errors, as considerable time has passed since the last execution, one method is outdated, and the other two are untested,” Vann said.
The prisoners’ motion includes interviews in news articles in which various prison officials describe the difficulties of carrying out executions or working closely with death row inmates.
South Carolina inmates are asking for 13 weeks between executions amid problems Oklahoma came up against when it tried to speed up the pace of executions there, leading to problems carrying out death sentences. Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond said in January 2023 that holding an execution every month was a burden on prison staff.
Owens was convicted of murdering a Greenville store clerk in a 1997 convenience store robbery.
The other South Carolina inmates who no longer have an appeal are:
— Richard Moore, 59, convicted of the 1999 murder of a Spartanburg store clerk.
— Brad Sigmon, 66, convicted of beating his estranged girlfriend’s parents to death with a baseball bat in Greenville County in 2001.
— Marion Bowman, 44, convicted of killing an Orangeburg woman and setting her body on fire because she owed him money in 2001.
— Mikal Mahdi, 41, convicted of shooting an off-duty police officer in his Calhoun County home and setting his body on fire in 2004.
There are currently 32 inmates on South Carolina’s death row.