SC man who received rare double death sentence chooses method of execution
A South Carolina man on death row for two separate murders in 2005 has opted to die by lethal injection.
Stephen Christopher Stanko, who wrote a book about his experiences in prison following an earlier conviction for assault and kidnapping, received an unusual two death sentences at two separate murder trials for a pair of slayings in April 2005. Stanko was convicted in Georgetown County for the murder of his girlfriend, librarian Laura Ling, in her Murrells Inlet home. He also sentenced to 110 years for sexually assaulting and slitting the throat of Ling’s daughter, who survived and called the police.
In 2009, Stanko was also sentenced to death in Horry County for the murder of his friend Henry Lee Turner in Conway.
Stanko is scheduled to be executed on June 13.
He will be the sixth person executed since South Carolina resumed carrying out the death penalty in 2024 following a 13-year pause. Stanko is the third inmate to opt for lethal injection. The attorneys for a fourth inmate, Freddie Owens, chose lethal injection for him after Owens said that choosing his method of death was the equivalent of suicide and therefore against his religious beliefs.
South Carolina law requires death row inmates select their method of execution from lethal injection, electric chair or firing squad.
Stanko’s choice of lethal injection comes after attorneys submitted evidence of a “botched” firing squad execution of Mikal Mahdi. Mahdi, only the second person in South Carolina to choose death by firing squad, survived for several seconds after being shot.
An autopsy revealed that the bullets did not directly hit his heart and only two bullet entry wounds were found in his body. The Department of Corrections has maintained that three rounds were fired and that two of the bullets entered the same wound and traveled along the same path.
Concerns have also been raised about South Carolina’s lethal injection protocol, which calls for death by a single, massive dose of pentobarbital, a powerful sedative. However, autopsy reports obtained by The State newspaper suggest that inmates who receive the lethal injection suffer from a pulmonary edema, a painful condition where the lungs fill with fluid creating the feeling of drowning. Experts have warned that this might constitute unconstitutionally cruel and unusual punishment.
The federal government, which also uses pentobarbital in executions, put a pause on the use of the method in the last days of the Biden administration. It remains under review for federal executions.
This story was originally published May 30, 2025 at 4:46 PM.