South Carolina has executed someone for the first time in 13 years. They gave a lethal injection to a 46-year-old man named Freddie Owens. He was found guilty of murder in 1999.
Freddie Owens was given the death penalty for killing a store worker named Irene Graves during a robbery in Greenville in 1997.
Right before the execution, another man involved in the crime named Steve Golden said that Freddie Owens was not there during the robbery. But the South Carolina Supreme Court did not stop the execution.
The court said that Steve Golden’s new statement did not match what he said back in 1999. During the trial, Golden said that Owens shot Irene Graves because she couldn’t open a safe.
Freddie Owens was given the lethal injection at the Broad River Correctional Institute in Columbia on Friday evening. He was declared dead at 6:55 p.m. local time (10:55 p.m. GMT). He did not say any final words before his death.
This execution ended a 13-year break in South Carolina. The state had trouble getting the drugs needed for lethal injections. Owens, who was 19 when the crime happened, was sentenced to death in 1999. The day after he was convicted, he also killed his cellmate, which added more crimes to his record.
Freddie Owens’ lawyers tried many times to stop the execution. They used Steve Golden’s new statement as proof that Owens might be innocent. But the court did not agree because Golden’s new words were different from what he said before.
The prosecutors also said that many witnesses heard Owens confess to killing Irene Graves. She was a 41-year-old single mother of three children.
Freddie Owens’ mother, Dora Mason, and people against the death penalty also asked for mercy, but Governor Henry McMaster said no.
Just a few hours before her son was executed, Dora Mason called the execution a “grave injustice.”
In South Carolina, inmates can choose how they want to be executed—by lethal injection, electric chair, or firing squad. Freddie Owens let his lawyer choose for him, and his lawyer picked lethal injection.
Journalists who watched the execution said that Irene Graves’ family members were there.