Fifteen months after SC resumed executions, who remains on death row?

In September 2024, South Carolina executed its first person in more than a decade. Executions in the state had been forced to stop in 2011 due to a nationwide shortage of the drugs used in the lethal injection.

Since South Carolina resumed carrying out the death penalty, a total of seven people have been executed. Today, 23 men remain on South Carolina’s death row.

Some names are familiar around the state or even the country. Other crimes are familiar only to the communities they devastated.

There are those that killed impulsively, committing murder during robberies or violent assaults. Others planned their crimes, seeking revenge or money. Their victims include strangers, wives, parents, friends and children.

The oldest cases date back to 1989. The most recent convictions are from 2019. Fourteen of the men on death row are white, 9 are Black.

Execution notices are issued by the state Supreme Court when a defendant has exhausted their “normal” options for appeals in the state and federal court system.

Final appeals continue sometimes up until the last minutes before an execution, when lawyers and the condemned wait to hear if the U.S. Supreme Court will take up their case and halt the execution.

In South Carolina, condemned individuals then must choose their method of death from electric chair, firing squad or lethal injection by pentobarbital, a powerful sedative.

Not all the 23 men currently on death row will see the inside of the state death chamber.

Ron Finklea, who shot and set fire to a Lexington County security guard, and Donnie Council, who sexually assaulted and murdered a 72-year-old widow, are awaiting resentencing, according to the South Carolina Attorney General’s Office.

Mar-reece Hughes has been on death row since his conviction in 1995 despite being found not competent to be executed. Hughes was convicted of murdering York County Sheriff’s Deputy Brent McCants in 1992. While awaiting trial, he attacked and killed another inmate and was sent to a prison psychiatric hospital. According to court records, he was fit to stand trial after being forcibly medicated but is considered incompetent to be executed.

Two other men – John Richard Wood, who killed a South Carolina highway patrol officer, and school shooter James Wilson – are currently awaiting hearings to see if they are competent to be executed.

What other executions might be coming up?

Steven Bixby, who shot two law enforcement officers in an ambush, is among the closest to exhausting his regular appeals.

In August, Bixby was found competent to be executed. His attorneys had argued that Bixby’s religious fixations and unwavering belief in ideas connected to the sovereign citizen movement meant that he was unable to communicate with them, making him incompetent to be executed under South Carolina law. Bixby remains convinced that the courts that convicted him are “satanic” and hold no legitimate authority. He also believes that evidence of angels and the DNA of Jesus Christ at his crime scene will exonerate him.

Gary Terry, who was sentenced to death for rape and murder in Lexington County, was also found competent to be executed this year. In July, a Lexington County judge ruled that Terry was notintellectually disabled. In 1997, Terry was convicted of breaking into the home of Urai Jackson, where he cut her phone lines before raping and killing her.

In a rare case, a convicted murderer from York County, James Robinson, is attempting to force an end to his appeals so that he can be executed. There are no prior findings that Robertson, who murdered his parents in 1999 and staged it to look like a break in, is incompetent. If Robertson succeeds over his attorneys’ objections, the state Supreme Court will likely issue a death warrant.

Who else is on death row?

Perhaps the most infamous killer currently on South Carolina’s death row is Timothy Jones, also from Lexington County. In 2019, Jones was convicted of murdering his five children inside the family’s mobile home. Jones attempted to cover up the crime, buying acid and bleach before he disposed of their bodies in black trash bags on the side of a road in Camden, Alabama.

At trial, Jones attempted to argue that he was not guilty by reason of insanity, but this argument was rejected by the jury.

Among the other 15 are Anthony Woods, convicted of murdering a Clarendon County teacher, Jerry Inman, who raped and killed a student at Clemson University, and Tyree Roberts, who killed two Beaufort County sheriff’s deputies.

While Mitchell Carlton Sims was sentenced to death in South Carolina for the murder of two coworkers at a Dominoes Pizza in Hanahan, he’s currently sitting in California’s death row. Sims was sentenced to death in California for murdering a Domino’s delivery driver just days after the South Carolina slayings.

But some convicted killers, even those considered the worst of the worst, escape death row. Todd Kohlhepp, a serial killer convicted of murdering seven people and who claimed to have killed many more, received a life sentence.

Once prominent attorney Alex Murdaugh received two life sentences for the murders of his wife and son. The prosecution’s theory was that Murdaugh gunned down his family in order to distract from the looming discovery of his theft of millions of dollars.

The complete list of South Carolina’s death row

• Bayan Aleksey
• Steven Vernon Bixby
• Ricky Lee Blackwell, Sr
• Luzenski Allen Cottrell
• Donnie S. Council
• William Dickerson
• Ron Oneal Finklea
• Mar-Reece Hughes
• Jerry Buck Inman
• Jerome Jenkins Jr
• Timothy Ray Jones
• Marion A Lindsey
• Tyree Alphonso Roberts
• James D. Robertson
• Mitchell Carlton Sims
• Norman Starnes
• Bobby Wayne Stone
• Gary Dubose Terry
• Andres Antonio Torres
• James William Wilson
• Louis Michael Winkler
• John Richard Wood
• Anthony Woods