Media witnesses look at the lethal injection table in the execution chamber at the Utah State Correctional Facility after the Taberon Honie execution Thursday, Aug. 8, 2024, in Salt Lake City. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer, Pool)
COLUMBIA — In a flurry of legal requests leading up to Freddie Owens’ scheduled execution, his attorneys continue to try to get it stopped either by a court order or an unlikely reprieve from South Carolina’s governor.
At 6 p.m. Friday, Owens is set to become the first person executed in the state in 13 years.
Owens, who changed his legal name to Khalil Divine Black Sun Allah in 2015, was sentenced to death in 1999 for killing a gas station clerk in Greenville during a robbery, though he and his attorneys maintain he is innocent.
His death by lethal injection will be the first execution after the state Supreme Court ruled electrocution and firing squad are constitutional, clearing the way for death warrants to resume.
A federal judge declined Wednesday to halt Owens’ execution over his attorneys’ latest federal challenge seeking more information about the drugs that will end his life. Hours later, his attorneys filed a new motion with the state Supreme Court again asking justices to put his death on hold.
They point to new claims by Owens’ convicted accomplice in seeking a new trial.
Federal judge refuses to halt Friday’s execution in SC
In a declaration signed Wednesday, Steven Golden says he falsely testified 25 years ago that Owens was the shooter.
Owens wasn’t even with him that night; the “real shooter” was someone else Golden still doesn’t want to name out of fear of retribution, according to his two-page statement.
If the court decides again not to intervene, the only remaining avenue of halting Owens’ execution would be for Gov. Henry McMaster to grant him clemency.
A group of activists gave McMaster’s office two petitions Thursday asking him to stop the execution. Each received more than 5,000 signatures. The hand delivery came a day after Owens’ attorneys made their formal request for a lighter sentence.
Despite the federal judge’s refusal to stop Owens’ execution over attorneys’ questions about the state’s drug supply, the lawsuit filed in Columbia last Friday will continue for the sake of other condemned inmates who will soon have to choose their execution method.
Executions could continue through March.
The next time the state’s high court might issue a death warrant would be Sept. 27, as per its own timeline. Justices agreed to schedule executions at least five weeks apart.
The order of upcoming executions will be based on the date of the crime that sent them to death row. That means next in line is Richard Moore, who was convicted in 2001 of killing a gas station clerk two years earlier.
The six men, including Owens, who face imminent execution are among 32 listed on South Carolina’s death row: 15 Black and 17 white. However, one is on death row in California for crimes committed in that state.
Since the state’s last execution in 2011, four condemned inmates have died of natural causes or suspected suicide. Twenty others have been resentenced, though none have been exonerated, according to the state Department of Corrections.
Questions over lethal injection
In 2023, after two years of being unable to carry out an execution because the state couldn’t secure the lethal drugs, legislators expanded a law promising to keep private the names of manufacturers who supplied them.
The law worked as legislators hoped. Corrections Director Bryan Stirling announced last September his agency had enough pentobarbital to carry out a death sentence by lethal injection. He assured Owens’ attorneys he had tested the state’s supply of drugs to ensure they were pure and effective, according to court filings.
But attorneys for death row inmates argued in last Friday’s federal lawsuit that officials could, and should, tell them more.
Owens’ attorneys made a similar argument while mulling over which method to choose for his execution, which the state’s high court rejected.
Owens signed his decision-making powers over to his attorney, including selecting how he would die. He refused to choose for himself because he saw the act as similar to suicide, which is a sin in his Islamic faith, according to court filings.
In the end, his attorney chose lethal injection over the other options of electrocution and firing squad.
Since 1995, when the Legislature shifted the default method of carrying out a death sentence from electrocution to lethal injection, only three of the 39 inmates executed since chose to die in the electric chair, most recently in 2008, according to the Department of Corrections.
Legislators reversed state law in 2021, after Corrections’ supply of lethal drugs expired, to again make electrocution the default method. However, court challenges continued to put executions on hold.
But those delays may have come to an end.
Owens’ crime
Owens was convicted in 1999 of shooting Irene Graves, a cashier at a Speedway convenience store, the night of Halloween in 1997.
Owens, who was 19 at the time, had been robbing stores in Greenville with a group of friends.
Two of them robbed a Prestige Cleaners, then all four went to a Conoco before splitting up. Owens and Steven Golden went to the Speedway, while the other two went to a nearby Waffle House, according to court records.
Around 4 a.m. Nov. 1, Owens and Golden entered the Speedway and demanded Graves open the safe. She couldn’t because she didn’t know the combination, she told them. Owens shot her in the head, and he and Golden took $37.29 out of the cash register, Golden testified to at the time.
Graves was a 41-year-old single mother to three children.
The Speedway was one of her three jobs. She also worked at Kmart and Bi-Lo, according to her obituary. One of her children was away at college. The other two were 8 and 10, the Spartanburg Herald-Journal reported at the time.
Graves and her younger children, Jeremy and Ensley, were very close, and she would often take them to dance classes and competitions, a victim coordinator testified during Owens’ original sentencing.
The night after his conviction in February 1999, Owens returned to the Greenville County jail to await his sentencing. There, he killed fellow inmate Christopher Lee.
Lee was a 28-year-old who was serving a 90-day sentence for traffic violations. Owens claimed Lee taunted him for his conviction, so Owens beat Lee, choked him and stabbed him with a pen, court documents say he told investigators later.
Lee had been planning to move to Myrtle Beach after he got out of jail and had a job as a carpenter for a framing company lined up, The Greenville News reported soon after his death. Family members said he loved auto racing and computers, the newspaper reported.
In court the next day, Owens described killing Lee in detail while on the stand. He confessed to investigators, telling them he killed Lee “because I was wrongly convicted of murder,” according to a statement published by the solicitor.
Owens never went to trial for killing Lee.
Prosecutors dropped that charge in 2019, soon after Owens ran out of appeals for killing Graves. The dismissal motion prosecutors used would allow them to raise the charge again if they chose, according to court documents.
Courts went back and forth on Owens’ death sentence.
The state Supreme Court twice sent Owens’ case back to a jury for resentencing, citing legal issues. Both times, the jury again recommended Owens be put to death.
In a motion Wednesday evening, Owens’ attorneys pointed to Golden’s new statement claiming he was high on cocaine when police arrested and questioned him, and he lied about Owens’ participation to save his own life.
Golden received 30 years in prison for his role in the robbery. He’s up for parole in November, though he’s expected to be release until 2026, according to his inmate report.
A troubled childhood
Owens’ actions were a result of a troubled childhood, his attorneys have argued.
Owens was born prematurely to a mother who used drugs, including during her pregnancy. Both his biological parents and his stepfather abused Owens and his three siblings physically and emotionally throughout their childhoods. His father and stepfather dealt drugs and were often in and out of prison, according to court filings.
When Owens was 5 years old, he and his siblings were placed in foster care because they had been left at home alone with no food or electricity. He struggled in school, receiving failing grades and getting in trouble for fighting with other children. After repeating several grades, he dropped out of school in 9th grade, according to court filings.
“There were literally no parental figures, no models who were not substance or violent criminals or both involved in his early life,” one doctor wrote after evaluating Owens and his history.
Owens spent time in the state’s juvenile justice system, where other teenagers abused him physically and sexually, his attorneys have said.
At some point during his childhood, Owens suffered damage to his frontal lobe, the part of the brain that regulates a person’s impulses and emotions. That led to violent and aggressive outbursts, anxiety, depression, paranoia and seizures, according to court filings.
Owens’ violent past made him take longer to emotionally mature and got him stuck in a cycle of violence, his attorneys have said. They pointed to his brain damage in 2021, when Owens was previously scheduled for execution, as a reason to keep him out of the death chamber.
The state Supreme Court denied that argument and instead halted his execution over since-settled legal questions. Inmates must meet a high bar to be considered incompetent for execution, so his attorneys never tried to get a hearing, they said previously.
In the weeks leading up to Owens’ execution, his attorneys instead focused on what they said were holes in his case.
No forensic evidence tied Owens to the scene of the crime. Prosecutors instead relied on a surveillance video that showed two people entering the gas station before one shot Graves, along with testimony from Owens’ friends and family, attorneys said.
But there was enough evidence to support that Owens was the one to kill Graves, the state Supreme Court replied in last week’s rejection. Witnesses testified that Owens was wearing the same mask as the shooter and that he bragged about killing Graves afterward, justices wrote.
Owens’ attorneys also argued that Golden had a secret deal with prosecutors to testify against Owens in exchange for a lighter sentence. That was something Owens knew about, or at least could have found out, during his initial appeals process, but it never previously came up and the time for that argument is past, the high court said in its order.
Besides, “Golden openly conceded in his testimony at Owens’ trial that he was testifying to avoid the death penalty,” justices wrote in last week’s denial.
In a petition asking McMaster for clemency Wednesday, Owens’ attorneys pointed to his age, brain damage and traumatic childhood, as well as the alleged legal problems they claimed in his appeals.
“For all of these reasons, clemency is necessary and appropriate to prevent Khalil’s unjust execution,” his attorneys said in a Wednesday news release.
What to expect Friday night
Before Owens is scheduled to die, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Charleston will lead a candlelight vigil for him outside the prison, according to activist group South Carolinians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty.
Around 5:45 p.m. Friday, barring any court intervention, the warden overseeing death row will call McMaster and Attorney General Alan Wilson on their landline phones.
The warden will ask Wilson whether Owens has any remaining appeals that should prevent his execution, then ask McMaster whether he wants to grant Owens clemency.
This is the first time McMaster, South Carolina’s former attorney general, will face the question of whether to give a death row inmate clemency.
He has declined to say his decision ahead of time, telling reporters repeatedly that he will answer the question only when it is required by law. He has maintained his support for the death penalty once all other legal avenues have been exhausted as a form of justice for victims’ families.
No South Carolina governor has granted an inmate clemency since the U.S. Supreme Court allowed executions to resume in 1976, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
If McMaster and Wilson both answer “no,” the execution will proceed.
In the death chamber at Broad River Secure Facility in Columbia, Owens will be injected with a fatal dose of pentobarbital, a barbiturate often used as a sedative. The same drug is often used to euthanize pets.
This would be the first time the state uses a single drug instead of its usual three-drug cocktail. Facing shortages of the other two drugs needed — a muscle relaxant and potassium chloride, which stops an inmate’s heart — the state joined at least nine others in using one drug for executions.