There is no good reason for SC to resume executions | Opinion
Pro-life South Carolina is about to get its wish. After many delays, the state will likely finally be able to commit premeditated murder on a man named Freddie Owens on Sept. 20 to punish Owens for having committed premeditated murder.
The South Carolina Supreme Court has all but cleared the way for the state to ramp up its murder machinery after more than 13 years of dormancy. It could mean the state will commit murder with regularity, beginning with Owens.
On Wednesday, SLED verified the drug cocktail that could be used to execute Owens — one of three methods the state can use. The others: The state could murder Owens by enlisting its newly-formed firing squad to put a bullet through his heart. Or, the state could murder him by sending a couple thousand volts of electricity through his body while witnesses watch.
There are still a few technicalities that could delay the Sept. 20 murder. The state is still deciding whether it should murder the five men who’ve exhausted their appeals in rapid succession or whether to wait as long as 13 weeks between murders to give the people they’ve enlisted to do the murdering time to recover from the reality that they’ve just committed a murder for the state in the name of justice.
Gov. Henry McMaster is not in favor of waiting. He’d rather the state get on with the murdering.
“I think the current law is a good law,” McMaster told reporters Tuesday when they asked about recent death penalty developments. “It was carefully devised, and there have been years of history on these kinds of things all over the country, and if our legislature made that decision (to keep the law as is), I think that’s a good decision. It’s a sound decision.”
Death row inmates must choose the method the state will use to murder them. Owens’ religious beliefs say that amounts to a suicide, which his faith forbids. He has asked his attorney to choose his execution method. The court must determine if an attorney can make such a decision, essentially making the death row inmate’s lawyer part of the state’s machinery of murder.
It’s not just South Carolina. Premeditated state murder might be making a comeback. After then-President Donald Trump rushed to murder several men in the federal murder chamber during his final months in office in 2019, President Joe Biden was supposed to lead us to a new day. But he hasn’t done much to push us closer to abolition at the federal level after suggesting he would. Biden’s Department of Justice has been pursuing death penalty cases.
The Democratic Party removed anti-death penalty language from the party’s platform during the Democratic National Convention. And though support for the death penalty is down from as high as 80% support in the mid-‘90s (according to Gallup), today about half of the public still favors premeditated state murder — even though half the country says it is unfairly applied.
It gets tiring reiterating what we clearly know about the practice. State-sponsored murder does not curb violent crime. It has a clear bias against Black and poor defendants. Innocent men have almost certainly been executed. We also know that state-sponsored execution is more expensive than locking the most dangerous among us away in prison for the rest of their lives.
There is no good reason to keep doing something much of the rest of the free world stopped doing years or decades ago. Despite that, the United States of America – Earth’s supposed beacon of hope – continues showcasing how much we love satisfying an insatiable bloodlust.
Owens was convicted in the 1997 murder of a gas station clerk. He and his accomplice left the store with $37.29. The night after he was convicted in 1999 he killed an inmate. He is neither a hero nor a martyr. He has blood on his hands. When the state murders him, so will the rest of us.
This story was originally published August 29, 2024 at 1:40 PM.