South Carolina’s execution chamber. (Provded/SC Department of Corrections)
COLUMBIA — Death row inmate Marion Bowman chose to die by lethal injection, while still suing for more information about the drug the state will use to kill him, his attorneys said Friday.
The decision came a day after the state Supreme Court turned down an attempt by Bowman’s attorneys to halt his Jan. 31 execution. Unless a court or the governor intervenes, Bowman will be the third inmate to die by lethal injection since the state resumed executions in September, following a 13-year hiatus.
Death row inmates have the choice to die by lethal injection, electrocution or firing squad. If Bowman had not made a decision by Friday, the deadline required by law, the state would have selected electrocution. Legislators made that the default method in the 2021 law that added firing squad as an option.
“He made this choice to avoid the default method of execution by electrocution,” Lindsey Vann, an attorney representing Bowman for Justice360, said in a statement. “Mr. Bowman and his legal team still have significant concerns about the quality of the lethal injection drugs used in South Carolina executions because the Department of Corrections continues to refuse to provide any basic information about the drugs, including the expiration date and storage procedures.”
Bowman, 44, was sentenced to death in 2002 for shooting and killing single mother Kandee Martin of Orangeburg in 2001, then stuffing her body in the trunk of her own car and lighting the car on fire in rural Dorchester County. He maintains that he’s innocent, despite courts repeatedly ruling otherwise. In his explanation last month, he said he and Martin were having an affair.
Renewed questions over drug secrecy
Before Bowman goes to the death chamber, his attorneys want to know more about the lethal sedative set to kill him.
Little information is available about the drugs under a 2023 law that worked as intended. The law, which keeps the origins of any drug used in executing inmates a secret, helped corrections officials find a supplier of sedative pentobarbital four months later.
Bowman’s attorneys want to know when and how the drugs were tested, when they expire and how the department stores them, they wrote in the latest federal lawsuit filed last Friday.
If the drugs are expired, stored incorrectly or tested in a way that does not detect problems with the drug itself, Bowman could suffer while he dies, or the execution could fail and potentially leave him with long-term health issues, his attorneys claimed in the lawsuit.
“This lawsuit’s purpose is not to permanently halt Bowman’s execution,” the filing reads. “His aim is only to require State officials to carry out his execution with the transparency and access to information about critically important government functions that state law allows and the Constitution requires.”
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Those arguments mirror those attorneys made in another lawsuit filed in September on behalf of the six inmates who had exhausted their appeals. Bowman is one of four still facing the death chamber in the coming months.
A federal judge dismissed the other case in October, deciding that inmates don’t have a right to know any more about the drug itself than is already provided. What inmates can ask for is more information about the process of testing the drug to make sure it’s ready for use, U.S. District Judge Jacquelyn Austin ruled. That would need to be decided on a case-by-case basis, she wrote.
Raising those questions becomes especially pertinent because of concerns the attorneys have about the previous two executions, Bowman’s attorneys wrote. After viewing inmate Richard Moore’s autopsy report for the team of attorneys, a Tennessee doctor raised questioned whether something went wrong during the November execution based on the length of time between the first dose of pentobarbital and his time of death.
The sedative used for lethal injection, at the strength at which it is administered, should take only a minute or so to be fatal, the doctor wrote. Moore’s time of death was 23 minutes after the drug started flowing, though media witnesses reported that Moore stopped moving about three minutes after the execution began.
Bowman’s weight, at nearly 400 lbs, could cause more complications if officials don’t use enough of the drug or a high enough potency to kill him immediately, the attorneys wrote.
If Bowman’s attorneys get their way, his execution date could be pushed back to give him and his attorneys time to review the information provided and make a decision about whether he still wants to die by lethal injection, they wrote.
A federal judge has asked the state’s attorneys to file a response by Wednesday.
Supreme Court ruling
Claims of withheld evidence and racism from Bowman’s own attorney during his 2002 trial are not enough to make justices believe his sentencing would have been any different, the state Supreme Court decided Thursday.
The court does not have any obligation to consider Bowman’s personal growth while in prison, the state’s highest court wrote in disagreeing with an argument that the justices should consider overturning his sentence for that reason.
The ruling falls in line with previous courts, which also decided the defense team had access to much of the evidence but didn’t use it. Most of the evidence wouldn’t have helped Bowman’s case if it had come up during trial, the Supreme Court’s order read.
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That included a letter in which a fellow inmate claimed one of the witnesses in Bowman’s trial confessed to the crime. The inmate later took back his statement, saying Bowman had told him to write it. Regardless, the letter “contained multiple levels of hearsay,” which would have discounted it during a hearing, the justices wrote.
Jurors might have been swayed by knowing one witness had pending charges against him, which might have led jurors to believe he was trying to win favor with the state, the order reads. But the sentencing did not rely enough on that testimony to convince justices it would have changed the jury’s verdict or sentence, the justices wrote.
The court completely rejected Bowman’s argument that his own defense attorney, who is white, was racist against him because he is Black.
Bowman’s current attorneys claimed that his original defense attorney referred to Bowman’s victim as a “little girl” or “little white girl” while calling him a man, despite him being just a year older.
That was “a meritless narrative,” the state Supreme Court wrote in its order. The attorney’s work was “in no way indicative of racism,” the decision continued.
Bowman’s attorneys could appeal the matter to the U.S. Supreme Court, which denied appeals for Owens and Moore.
The governor has the ability to grant clemency to any death row inmate, sparing them the death penalty in favor of life in prison.
Gov. Henry McMaster, who has made it a rule to not announce his decision until the final minutes before an execution begins, declined to grant clemency during either of the past two executions.