Latest SC death row inmate gets execution date set for next month
The S.C. Supreme Court has set the latest execution date for a South Carolina death row inmate.
Stephen Stanko will be put to death on Friday, June 13, the state Supreme Court ordered on Friday. The convicted Horry County killer has until the end of the month to choose his method of execution: electrocution, firing squad or lethal injection.
Stanko, 57, was sentenced to death for the 2006 killing of his friend, 74-year-old Henry Turner. Stanko shot Turner at Turner’s home using a pillow as a silencer, then stole Turner’s truck and drove to Augusta for the Masters golf tournament.
Before killing Turner, Stanko also beat and strangled his girlfriend to death at her home and raped her teenage daughter. He was convicted of both killings and sentenced to death in separate trials. At one point, Stanko’s own attorney told the jury he was a “psychopath” without the ability to feel empathy or control his impulses.
He will be the sixth inmate put to death since the state resumed executions in September 2024, after a lack of drugs needed for lethal injections stopped the state from conducting executions for more than a decade.
Two inmates, Brad Sigmon and Mikal Mahdi, have chosen to be executed by firing squad. Mahdi’s attorneys have said his execution was “botched” after the executors’ bullets missed his heart and it took him up to a minute to die in “excruciating conscious pain and suffering.”
Three others have opted to die by lethal injection, although an autopsy on Marion Bowman, executed on Jan. 31, showed a fluid buildup in his lungs that may have given the sensation of drowning as he died.
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