This text has been up to date with the execution.
COLUMBIA — Freddie Owens was executed Friday night by deadly injection, after his attorneys’ last-chance enchantment to the U.S. Supreme Courtroom did not cease it.
Owens was pronounced lifeless at 6:55 p.m., making him the primary inmate executed in South Carolina in practically 14 years.
He made no remaining assertion. When the execution started, Owens checked out his lawyer. She smiled at him, and he appeared to smile again, mentioned Related Press reporter Jeffrey Collins. He and different media witnesses who spoke to reporters afterward agreed that Owens confirmed no outward indicators of struggling.
The execution, which was scheduled for six p.m., was delayed by 35 minutes as officers waited on a ruling from the nation’s excessive court docket.
Owens’ attorneys requested justices Friday to place his sentence on maintain pending the end result of a problem they filed every week in the past in federal court docket searching for extra data on the drug to kill him, saying they wanted the small print to make sure his execution can be painless and efficient. In a three-sentence order, the U.S. Supreme Courtroom — just like the decrease courts earlier than it — refused, whereas noting that Justice Sonia Sotomayor disagreed.
The ruling capped weeks of failed authorized makes an attempt for a reprieve in state and federal courts. Owens’ final hope to remain alive fell to Gov. Henry McMaster, who mentioned no.
“I’ve declined to grant any type of govt clemency on this matter,” McMaster wrote in a letter confirming in writing what he advised Corrections Director Bryan Stirling by telephone.
Owens, 46, died 25 years after he was convicted of killing gasoline station clerk Irene Graves throughout a string of robberies on Halloween night time 1997.
Witnesses included Graves’ oldest son and son-in-law.
The curtain to the dying chamber parted at 6:35 p.m. to disclose Owens in a inexperienced jumpsuit, a white blanket pulled as much as the center of his chest. He was strapped to a medical desk along with his arms out to both facet. Three jail officers stood within the room with Owens, media witnesses mentioned.
Owens turned his head to have a look at the witnesses, his gaze deciding on his lawyer Emily Paavola, who was the one to resolve he would die by deadly injection. He smiled and mouthed some phrases to her that witnesses couldn’t hear behind the pane of glass separating the chamber from the witness room. At one level, he appeared to mouth, “Bye,” Justin Dougherty from Fox Carolina Information, one other media witness, advised reporters.
A minute later, the drug started to movement by means of an IV inserted in Owens’ left arm. His eyes closed, and he began respiratory closely. After 4 or 5 minutes, his face started to twitch and his respiratory turned shallow.
At 6:42 p.m., his movement stopped. A health care provider entered the room at 6:54 p.m. to pronounce Owens’ time of dying. Owens saved his head tilted towards Paavola the whole time, media witnesses mentioned.
Graves’ relations watched the execution intently, staring straight at Owens the whole time. In any other case, they didn’t react, Collins mentioned.
Collins, who witnessed six executions by deadly injection earlier than Owens’, mentioned that apart from the wait at the start, the execution proceeded in the identical means as earlier ones. The one distinction was that it appeared to take Owens longer to cease respiratory from the time the medication started flowing. That took about six minutes, in comparison with two or three minutes at earlier executions, Collins mentioned.
It was the primary time the state used a single dose of the sedative pentobarbital as an alternative of its earlier three-drug cocktail, which expired after the final execution in 2011.
Who Owens noticed main as much as his dying is unknown. Corrections’ coverage is to not launch data on what dying row inmates do or who they see of their final days.
His final meal was two cheeseburgers, French fries, a well-done ribeye steak, six wings, two strawberry sodas and a slice of apple pie, all from the jail kitchen, mentioned Division of Corrections spokeswoman Chrysti Shain.
Authorized and private pleas
Two days earlier than his execution, the one witness to the capturing — who was convicted as Owens’ confederate — signed a press release saying he falsely recognized and testified towards Owens, newly claiming that Owens wasn’t even with him that night time.
Hours earlier than Owens’ scheduled finish, Owens’ mom made a public plea to McMaster to spare her son’s life.
“Freddie is greater than his conviction. He’s a human being, a son, a brother, and a good friend,” his mom, Dora Mason, mentioned in a press release launched by the Greenville nonprofit Combating Injustice Collectively. “He deserves compassion, understanding, and a good probability at justice. As a substitute, the system has failed him and the sufferer at each flip.”
Mason expressed sympathy for the household of Irene Graves, who was a single mom of three, whereas asking the folks of South Carolina to contemplate whether or not the state ought to execute Owens.
“To the governor, the Legislature, and the folks of South Carolina, I ask: Is that this actually justice? Is that this actually what we name compassion and mercy?”
Mason, who nonetheless lives in Greenville, pointed to the identical arguments that Owens’ attorneys have made over the past a number of weeks as they sought unsuccessfully to cease the execution and get a brand new trial.
Within the month since Owens was scheduled for execution, his attorneys have claimed that Steven Golden, Owens’ convicted confederate, had a secret cope with a prosecutor in alternate for testifying towards his good friend. On Wednesday, Golden recanted what he advised legislation enforcement and jurists about that night time, alleging the “actual shooter” was another person completely that Golden nonetheless doesn’t wish to title out of concern of retaliation. He got here ahead, he mentioned, “to have a transparent conscience.”
The state Supreme Courtroom dismissed these arguments, noting Golden admitted at trial he was testifying to keep away from the dying penalty. Justices additionally indicated they didn’t imagine Golden’s new story, calling it “squarely inconsistent” with what he’s mentioned since his 1997 arrest.
The primary rejection on the problem searching for particulars on the state’s drug provide got here from a federal decide Wednesday. That was the choice appealed all the way in which to the U.S. Supreme Courtroom.
Dying penalty protesters
An hour forward of the scheduled execution, about 50 folks gathered exterior the jail campus gates to protest the dying penalty. Some chanted “cease the killing,” whereas others gathered in prayer.
Mersedes Mejia, of Columbia, was on her means residence Friday when a sense came to visit her that she ought to take a distinct route. She had heard concerning the pending execution on the information however the gathering of demonstrators exterior Broad River Correctional Middle took her abruptly. She circled and joined the group hoping and praying within the remaining hour the execution can be stopped.
Because the clock ticked to six p.m., the group began to quiet.
Lulu Torres, of Batesburg, dropped to her knees and made a silent prayer. She got here to Columbia with different members of St. John the Cross Catholic Church to show her perception that “life is efficacious.”
“It ought to finally be God’s resolution when our final day might be,” she mentioned. “Another person made that call for Mr. Owens, and that’s heartbreaking.”
Because the minutes handed, a lot of the group pressed up towards the fence ready for information.
A little bit after 7 p.m., demonstrators shaped a circle holding fingers and comforting those that have been crying as Ron Kaz, of Charleston, modified the quantity on an indication counting the variety of dying row executions within the U.S. since 1977 to incorporate that of Owens.
“We’re not right here to make excuses for the hurt Khalil did trigger throughout his life,” mentioned Rev. Hillary Taylor, govt director of South Carolinians for Alternate options to the Dying Penalty.
“However there’s additionally no justice for younger Khalil, a baby who skilled bodily hurt in his family and bodily and sexual hurt in juvenile jail services right here in South Carolina,” she mentioned. “Most of the time, these on dying row are the victims of another person’s violence lengthy earlier than they commit violence themselves. That is why we stand towards all executions. At its core, the dying penalty is a declaration that some victims of violence matter greater than others.”
Owens’ life and crimes
Owens was born prematurely right into a household life his attorneys have described as violent and chaotic. Each his organic mother and father and his stepfather used and dealt medication, and all three abused Owens and his three siblings. His father and stepfather have been out and in of jail all through his childhood, in line with court docket filings.
Owens went into foster care at 5 years previous after social employees discovered him and his siblings alone in a home with no meals or electrical energy. He dropped out of faculty in ninth grade after repeating a number of grades and sometimes entering into bother for preventing with different college students. As a teen, he frolicked within the state’s juvenile justice system, the place the opposite youngsters abused him bodily and sexually, his attorneys have mentioned.
SC justices once more refuse to cease Friday’s execution, regardless of new claims of innocence
Sooner or later, which medical doctors can’t pinpoint, Owens suffered harm to his frontal lobe, the a part of the mind that controls an individual’s impulses and feelings. He skilled violent outbursts, nervousness, despair, paranoia and seizures at completely different factors in his life, in line with court docket filings.
Owens was 19 years previous when Graves was shot within the head as two masked males robbed the Speedway comfort retailer the place she labored one in every of her three jobs. The youngest of the three kids she left behind was 8 years previous.
The Speedway was the third place that Owens and three mates — in line with Golden and others — robbed as Halloween became the early morning of Nov. 1, 1997.
Golden testified — each in 1999 and 2003 — that it was Owens who shot Graves, 41, as a result of she couldn’t open the shop’s protected. The pair of robbers left with $37.29 from the money register. Owens advised family and friends that he had killed Graves, bragging about it in some instances. Past Golden, these testifying towards Owens at his 1999 trial included his girlfriend and one other good friend on the theft spree. Owens’ attorneys have since disputed the reliability of what they mentioned.
In February 1999, a jury convicted Owens of killing Graves. That night time, between his conviction and sentencing listening to the following day, Owens killed a fellow inmate on the Greenville County jail, 28-year-old Christopher Lee.
Lee was serving a 90-day sentence for visitors violations. Owens confessed to the crime, then described intimately how he had killed Lee by choking him, slamming his head into the ground and shoving a pen up one nostril, in line with court docket paperwork.
That case by no means went to trial. Prosecutors dropped the costs in 2019, quickly after Owens exhausted his appeals for killing Graves, with the stipulation that they may convey them again if wanted.
Twice, the state Supreme Courtroom despatched Owens’ dying sentence again to a jury for resentencing. Each instances, the jury once more advisable sentencing Owens to dying.
However Owens has modified in the course of the 25 years he has spent in jail, one in every of his legal professionals, Rob Lee, mentioned throughout a Thursday night time vigil at Washington Road United Methodist Church in Columbia.
“Relatively than wallow within the extreme isolation of dying row, he started to learn,” Lee mentioned. “Then, he started to check.”
Owens took an curiosity in historical past, significantly African historical past. He instructed his niece write a paper on Nubian Queen Amanirenas, who resisted Roman rule within the historic Kingdom of Kush. He regaled his attorneys with details concerning the College of Timbuktu, bonobo apes, and the historical past of cartoon character Betty Boop, Lee mentioned.
He realized to learn and write in Arabic to strengthen his Islamic religion. In 2015, he legally modified his title to Khalil Divine Black Solar Allah. He known as his mom each day to test on her.
Owens wrote ideas and poems and essays, “creating a brand new recorded historical past of his life,” Lee mentioned.
Vigils forward of the execution
Through the vigil, a dozen activists made a remaining name for clemency. They peacefully walked the road exterior the Governor’s Mansion, holding indicators studying “finish the dying penalty” and “cease state killing.”
Ron Kaz, a member of the board of South Carolinians for Alternate options to the Dying Penalty, has pushed from Charleston to Columbia to sit down vigil for 42 of the 43 executions carried out within the state since 1985, he mentioned. He might be again Friday night time for his forty third vigil exterior the razor wire of the jail gates.
“For me, it will get more durable each time,” Kaz mentioned.
Within the time between an individual’s crime and execution, quite a bit can change, he mentioned.
“The folks which can be getting executed should not the identical individuals who have been sentenced to dying,” Kaz mentioned.
Paul Palmer, a protestor from Columbia, mentioned he disagreed with the concept executions convey justice for the relations of the victims. After his nephew was killed whereas working a shift at a video poker parlor within the Nineteen Eighties, the prosecutor requested Palmer’s household whether or not they wished to hunt the dying penalty.
Palmer knew that sentence wouldn’t convey the household the peace they have been in search of. He pushed as an alternative for a life sentence, which the perpetrators finally acquired, he mentioned.
“I don’t need that sort of justice,” he advised his brother-in-law and sister on the time, he mentioned.
Activists identified the uneven methods by which the dying penalty is commonly utilized. Black folks, like Owens, are disproportionately sentenced to dying, civil rights leaders have argued.
Of the 282 folks executed in South Carolina since 1912, 74% have been Black and 26% have been white, in line with Division of Corrections knowledge.
Of the 32 males on the state’s dying row, 15 are Black and 17 are white. Individuals with disabilities, equivalent to Owens’ mind harm, are additionally extra prone to face execution, mentioned Rev. Hillary Taylor, director of South Carolinians for Alternate options to the Dying Penalty.
“The dying penalty will not be justice,” Taylor mentioned. “It doesn’t cease violence from taking place. It solely creates extra victims.”
It’s probably activists might be again in Columbia over the course of the following six months because the state Supreme Courtroom schedules 5 extra males who’ve exhausted their appeals for execution, Taylor mentioned.
“Sadly, there could also be many future vigils,” Taylor mentioned.
Jessica Holdman contributed to this report.