South Carolina Supreme Court Sets First Execution Date in More Than 13 Years

On August 23, 2024, the South Carolina Department of Corrections announced that the state supreme court has set a September 20, 2024, execution date for Freddie Owens, which would be the first execution in South Carolina since 2011. Mr. Owens was convicted and sentenced to death in 1999 for the killing of a convenience store clerk in Greenville, South Carolina and he was later convicted in the murder of a cellmate. In a July 31^st ruling, the South Carolina Supreme Court decided that the state’s three execution methods—lethal injection, firing squad, and electrocution—were valid methods of execution that are not considered “cruel, corporal, or unusual punishment.” Consequently, Mr. Owens will be forced to choose which method will be used for his execution.

The director of SCDOC will have five days to determine that all three methods of execution are available and must provide Mr. Owens’ attorneys with proof that the lethal injection drugs in SCDOC’s possession are stable and mixed properly. This is a requirement that comes from the state supreme court’s interpretation of a secrecy law passed in 2023. Mr. Owens will then have just a week to choose a method of execution. If he does not decide, he will be executed by the electric chair. John Blume, an attorney for Mr. Owens, told theAssociated Press that the defense team is waiting for prison officials to submit sworn statements about the purity and potency of the lethal injection drugs in their possession. Mr. Blume said that “the lack of transparency about the source of the execution drugs, how they were obtained and whether (they) can bring about as painless a death as possible is still of grave concern to the lawyers that represent persons on death row.”

In early 2023, South Carolina passed legislation shielding the identities of drug manufacturers and execution team members from the general public. In September 2023, Governor Henry McMaster announced that the state had procured pentobarbital and were “now prepared” to carry out lethal injection executions. According SCDOC officials, the department made more than 1,300 contacts in efforts to secure these drugs. In previous lethal injection executions, South Carolina used a three-drug protocol, but with the acquisition of pentobarbital, will now have a one-drug protocol. South Carolina, like many other states, had been unable to purchase the drugs needed to carry out lethal injection executions since their supply expired in 2013. In efforts to bring back capital punishment, in 2021, the state legislature passed legislation that authorized the firing squad as a method of execution.

Mr. Owens also has the opportunity to ask Governor McMaster for clemency and a commutation of his sentence to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. Since 1976, no South Carolina governors have granted clemency to individuals facing execution.