South Carolina set to execute death row inmate next month, the state’s first execution in over a decade

Freddie Owens, who has been on death row since 1997, will be the first person executed in the state since 2011

COLUMBIA — South Carolina will execute its first inmate in over a decade next month, the state Department of Corrections announced Friday.

Freddie Owens is scheduled to die Sept. 20.

By law, any execution must take place four Fridays after the order of execution is issued.

This will be the first execution to take place in South Carolina since 2011, when Jeffrey Brian Motts was executed using lethal injection. Soon after, the state’s supply of the drug expired, and the state Department of Corrections was unable to restock as pharmaceutical companies refused to sell their drugs to kill people.

Legislators made electric chair the default method of execution and added firing squad as an option in 2021. The next year, the state Supreme Court issued two orders of execution — neither of which were for Owens — later halting them amid a lawsuit in which four condemned men argued both methods were unconstitutional.

In an opinion issued July 31, Supreme Court justices disagreed with the inmates. The split decision allowed executions to resume.

Lethal injection also is once again an option for inmates. Corrections director Bryan Stirling informed legislators in September 2023 that the department had refilled its supply of the necessary drugs thanks to a new secrecy law that keeps everything about the drugs private, including who sold them.

“We will now see if the Department of Corrections is able to satisfy the state and federal courts that the pentobarbital it obtained from who knows who is of sufficient purity, potency and quality to carry out a humane execution,” said John Blume, the lawyer who represented the inmates in their Supreme Court case. “The lack of transparency about the source of the execution drugs, how they were obtained and whether can bring about as painless a death as possible is still of grave concern to the lawyers that represent persons on death row who potentially face an execution date.”

Inmates who want to choose a method of death other than electric chair, the default, must do so in writing 14 days before their scheduled execution date.

The corrections department is prepared for inmates to choose any of the three methods of execution, Stirling told reporters last month.

Freddie Owens

Owens, 46, has been on death row since 1999. A jury convicted him of robbing and killing convenience store worker Irene Graves two years prior.

Owens was on a spree of robberies with a group of friends on Halloween night in 1997, according to court documents. He shot Graves in the head after she said she did not know the combination to the safe at the Speedway gas station where she worked.

The day after a jury convicted Owens of murder, he attacked and killed a fellow inmate at the Greenville Detention Center. During his sentencing hearing the next day, he confessed to the jailhouse murder and described it in detail.

“I really did it because I was wrongly convicted of murder,” he said, according to the statement published by the solicitor.

The Supreme Court twice sent Owens’ case back to a jury for resentencing. Both times, the jury recommended the death penalty. In 2008, the Supreme Court agreed.

In 2015, Owens legally changed his name to Khalil Divine Black Sun Allah. But Owens remains his name on legal filings and in the state Department of Corrections system for clarity’s sake, according to court filings.

Owens was twice scheduled to die in 2021, but the state Supreme Court halted his execution after deciding it was unconstitutional to put him to death by electric chair without giving him the option of lethal injection or firing squad.

The state has 32 men on death row, 15 Black and 17 white. One is on death row in California for crimes committed in that state.

Owens is one of five inmates who have exhausted all their appeals and are not waiting on any further court decisions. Two others have finished their normal appeals processes but are waiting for responses on other requests, the S.C. Attorney General’s Office said earlier this month.

Source: scdailygazette.com, S. Laird, August 23, 2024

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