Restraints are shown on 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 — South Carolina will not carry out any more executions until at least January, the state Supreme Court ruled in a Thursday order.
The order grants a temporary reprieve for four inmates who have exhausted their appeals and could be sentenced for execution after the state ended its unintended 13-year hiatus in September. The state has carried out two executions since then.
Under the court’s new schedule, the next date it could issue a death warrant would be Jan. 3. That means Jan. 31 would be the next potential date for an execution, since state law requires four weeks between the date the warrant is issued and the date of the execution. After that, the court would likely resume its previously set schedule of waiting at least five weeks between warrants.
Marion Bowman, a 44-year-old sentenced to death for fatally shooting an Orangeburg woman and lighting her body on fire, will likely be the one to receive that January warrant. Convicted in 2002, he is next in line after the high court announced it would schedule executions beginning with the oldest sentences.
Death row inmates ask for pause in executions over winter holiday
Initially, the schedule the state Supreme Court laid out would have set one execution each in November and January, though a hurricane-related delay adjusted that by a week.
The court’s order, which was signed by all five justices, was three sentences long and did not give a reason for the decision.
Attorneys for the four inmates who have run out of appeals cited the winter holidays in asking for a pause. The four weeks between executions are often spent in a flurry of last-minute legal filings and pleas for clemency as inmates’ attorneys make final attempts to get their clients off death row.
“Six consecutive executions with virtually no respite will take a substantial toll on all involved, particularly during a time of year that is so important to families,” the attorneys wrote in the court filing.
The state’s attorneys responded in their own filing that corrections staff are prepared to carry out executions at any time and the death chamber had operated during winter months before. Notably, the state executed six inmates, two the same day, between Dec. 4, 1998, and Jan. 22, 1999.
The state Supreme Court allowed executions to resume this year when it decided in July that electrocution and firing squad were constitutional methods of capital punishment.
Legislators added the firing squad and made the electric chair the default method in 2021 — a change which spurred a lawsuit and subsequent court decision over whether it constituted cruel and unusual punishment. Corrections officials had struggled for years to get the drugs used to kill death row inmates. After also passing a secrecy law protecting all information about where officials obtained lethal injection drugs, the corrections department was able to buy the fatal sedative pentobarbital, making that an option once again.
Both inmates executed this year chose to die by lethal injection. Freddie Owens was sentenced for shooting and killing a gas station clerk during an armed robbery. Richard Moore was sentenced for killing a gas station clerk despite entering the store unarmed.