South Carolina 's prisons director has said the state has all it needs to carry out its first execution in more than 13 years next month.
Death row inmate Freddie Owens has been given the option to decide how he wants to die - by lethal injection, electric chair or firing squad. Late last month, Corrections Director Bryan Stirling informed the inmate's lawyer that all three methods of putting a prisoner to death are available for his scheduled execution on September 20.
The 46-year-old was sentenced to death for killing convenience store clerk Irene Graves in Greenville in 1997. Prosecutors said he and friends robbed several businesses before going to the store.
One of the friends, Steven Golden, testified that Owens shot Graves in the head because she couldn't get the safe open, although a surveillance system video didn't clearly show who fired the shot. Surveillance videos only showed two masked figures enter the gas station, but the moment of the shooting wasn't caught on camera.
The prosecution never recovered the weapon used and did not present any scientific evidence linking Owens to the crime. Owens and his accomplice left the store with $37.29 from the cash register.
Prosecutors agreed to reduce Golden's murder charge to voluntary manslaughter and he was sentenced to 28 years in prison, according to court records. During the 1999 trial, Golden told jurors he had no deal with prosecutors and could face either a death sentence or life imprisonment even after testifying.
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However, in a sworn statement signed on August 22, Golden claimed he had made a side agreement with the prosecutors. Owens' lawyers argue that this revelation could have swayed the jury members who believed Golden's testimony.
After being convicted of murder at his initial trial in 1999, but before a jury determined his sentence, authorities said Owens killed his cellmate at the Greenville County jail. Investigators said Owens gave them a detailed account of how he killed Christopher Lee, stabbing and burning his eyes, choking him and stomping him while another prisoner was in the cell and stayed quietly in his bunk. He said he did it "because I was wrongly convicted of murder," according to a confession read by a prosecutor in court the next day.
Owens was charged with murder against Lee right after the jail killing. Court records show prosecutors dropped the charge in 2019 with the right to restore it around the time Owens exhausted his appeals for his death sentence in Graves' killing.
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The inmate had been scheduled for execution twice before in 2021, but on both occasions the High Court halted the executions due to legal questions about how he would die. His remaining avenue to try and save his life is if the SC governor, who has the lone ability to grant clemency and reduce a death sentence to life in prison, decides to do so.
However, no governor has done that in the state's 43 executions since the death penalty was restarted in the US in 1976. Gov. Henry McMaster said he will follow longtime tradition and not announce his decision until prison officials make a call from the death chamber minutes before the execution.
In August, he told reporters he hasn't decided what to do in Owens' case but as a former prosecutor he respects jury verdicts and court decisions. "When the rule of law has been followed, there really is only one answer," McMaster said.