A note to those preparing to help South Carolina murder Marion Bowman Jr. on Friday | Opinion

To those preparing to help South Carolina murder 44-year-old Marion Bowman Jr. on Friday:

I don’t know who you are. State officials have made sure no one knows.

It’s better that way to make you complicit in their crimes. It’s harder that way for anyone to get you to see what you’re about to do is wrong. But it is. You are. And you don’t have to do this.

You shouldn’t do this.

If Gov. Henry McMaster is certain of the righteousness of murdering a man to punish him for the sin of murder, McMaster should do the deed. The blood should be on his hands, not yours.

But history has shown us time and again the powerful are unwilling to do what they require of the powerless.

They want you to shackle and handcuff Bowman, to slowly march him from his cell to the murder chamber, to strap him to the murder gurney.

They want you to make sure Bowman’s body is positioned just so for you to stick a needle in his arm to make way for pentobarbital to depress his central nervous system and cause his heart to stop.

Better to make it look as though he’s just taking a nap.

You’ll have to take into your hands the plastic tube to push a murderous dose of that drug into Bowman’s body. You — not Director of the S.C. Department of Corrections Bryan Stirling. He wants to sleep easier than you on Friday night.

Those are your fingerprints all over the machinery of murder, not theirs. Isn’t that how it always works? They may even be threatening you with demotion if you decline to participate in murders made possible only because they’ve made them possible.

Some of those who came before you have reported extreme mental health problems and feeling like serial killers. But it takes a toll on all.

I guess you got lucky, though. Bowman didn’t choose murder by firing squad or electric chair. This time, you and two co-workers won’t have to put bullets through his heart and potentially watch the blood fly and splatter like an overly-graphic B-movie. You won’t have to endure the smell of burning flesh from the electric chair. Still, you may have to smell Bowman urinating and defecating the way condemned men have before him, or a murder IV popping out of a man’s arm while a doctor says, “Well, hopefully he has enough in him to kill him.”

The execution you’ll be participating in Friday will be designed to look like a pretty, peaceful murder, to leave the impression that it isn’t really murder.

But it is. It’s a premeditated, unnecessary killing of a man.

As a society, we are supposed to be against such acts. Bowman has already been in prison for more than two decades after being convicted in 2002 of murdering 21-year-old Kandee Martin in Dorchester County in 2001 when he was 20.

South Carolina’s Supreme Court, prison executives and vengeful legislators have assigned you to do their dirty work. You have to do the murdering.

You’ll have to live with it in ways they never will.

How nice of them to suddenly renew these murders after a 13-year hiatus with a limit on how many can take place — one every five weeks — and then give you a Christmastime break after the first two executions Sept. 20 and Nov. 1. Such upstanding Christ followers, they are.

Those who have come before you have talked about the long-term effects on their mental health. Severe depression. Suicidal thoughts. Post-traumatic stress disorder.

You’ll have to contend with all that, too, and with disrupted relationships that may never be repaired. You’ll wonder if God will ever forgive you for what you’ve done.

Meanwhile, those who sent you to do the murdering will remain comfortable in the governor’s mansion or in their judicial robes with quarter-million-dollar annual salaries and nice houses of their own.

They’ll tell you it is for the greater good, even though we know these state-executed murders neither prevent nor deter crime.

Yet, you are being required to carry out this unnecessary evil anyway.

You don’t have to do this.

You should tell McMaster if he condones these murders, he should do them himself, rather than stay behind a phone he won’t pick up to save the man about to be executed — and save your sanity.

This story was originally published January 29, 2025 at 6:00 AM with the headline "A note to those preparing to help South Carolina murder Marion Bowman Jr. on Friday | Opinion."