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SC to execute death row inmate next month, first execution in state in over a decade • SC Daily Gazette

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

Freddie Owens is expected to die on September 20th.

By law, every execution must take place four Fridays after the execution warrant is issued.

This is the first execution in South Carolina since 2011, when Jeffrey Brian Motts was executed by lethal injection. Soon after, the state's supply of the drug ran out, and the Department of Corrections was unable to replenish it because pharmaceutical companies refused to sell their lethal agents.

Lawmakers made the electric chair the default method of execution and added firing squad as an option in 2021. The following year, the state Supreme Court issued two execution orders—neither of which involved Owens—but later stayed them amid a lawsuit in which four death row inmates argued that both methods were unconstitutional.

Freddie Owens (provided by SC Department of Corrections)

In an opinion published on July 31, the Supreme Court judges disagreed with the prisoners. The split decision allowed the executions to resume.

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

“We will now see whether the Justice Department can convince state and federal courts that the pentobarbital it received from who knows who is of sufficient purity, potency and quality to carry out a humane execution,” said John Blume, the attorney representing the inmates in their Supreme Court case. “The lack of transparency about the source of the execution drugs, how they were obtained and whether they can produce the least painful death possible remains a serious concern for attorneys representing death row inmates who may be facing an execution date.”

Inmates who wish to choose a method of death other than the standard method of death by electric chair must notify the court in writing 14 days before the scheduled execution date.

The prison service is prepared for inmates to choose between three methods of execution, Stirling told reporters last month.

Freddie Owens

Owens, 46, has been on death row since 1999. A jury found him guilty of robbing and killing supermarket employee Irene Graves two years earlier.

According to court documents, Owens was on a robbery spree with a group of friends on Halloween night in 1997. 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 murder in prison and described it in detail.

After the South Carolina Supreme Court ruled that executions can take place, the execution of these five men could be scheduled

“I actually did it because I was wrongly convicted of murder,” he said, according to the attorney's released statement.

The Supreme Court has twice sent Owens' case back to a jury for re-sentencing. Both times, the jury recommended the death penalty. In 2008, the Supreme Court agreed with that recommendation.

In 2015, Owens officially changed his name to Khalil Divine Black Sun Allah. However, for clarity, Owens will continue to use his name in legal documents and in the state correctional system, court records show.

Owens' execution had been scheduled twice in 2021, but the state Supreme Court halted his execution after ruling that it was unconstitutional to execute him in the electric chair without giving him the option of lethal injection or firing squad.

There are 32 men on death row in the state, 15 black and 17 white. One of them is on death row in California for crimes he committed in that state.

Owens is one of five inmates who have exhausted all appeals and are not awaiting further court decisions. Two others have completed their normal appeals processes but are awaiting responses to other requests, the South Carolina Attorney General's office said earlier this month.

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