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 — The U.S. Supreme Court will not stop an inmate’s execution scheduled for Friday, according to a Thursday order.
Richard Moore, 59, had asked the nation’s highest court to keep him from the death chamber long enough to hear claims that prosecutors struck Black jurors because of their race during his 2001 trial. But in a two-sentence order, the justices declined.
Moore’s last chance to avoid lethal injection will be for Gov. Henry McMaster to grant him clemency. McMaster has said he will not announce his decision until minutes before Moore is scheduled to die at 6 p.m. Friday.
No governor has granted clemency since the U.S. Supreme Court allowed executions to resume in 1976.
Two jurors and the trial judge who handed down Moore’s sentence, as well as the state’s former corrections director, wrote letters to McMaster asking him to commute Moore’s sentence to life in prison.
They joined around two dozen other family members, friends and religious leaders whose pleas were included with Moore’s official clemency application submitted Wednesday.
2 jurors, trial judge, ex-corrections director ask for clemency in upcoming SC execution
Moore was sentenced for killing gas station clerk James Mahoney in 1999. Moore entered the store unarmed and fatally shot Mahoney with a gun the store owner kept behind the counter.
Moore has maintained that he and Mahoney had a fight over spare change before Mahoney drew a gun. After shooting Mahoney, Moore took $1,408 from the register, which prosecutors said indicated Moore had been planning to rob the store all along.
The jury that convicted Moore, who is Black, contained no Black members. Two Black people were found qualified, but prosecutors removed them from the jury pool, according to his attorney’s arguments to the high court.
Prosecutors kept prospective white jurors even though they had similar backgrounds to the Black jury candidates, who prosecutors struck over concerns about criminal charges and moral stances about murder, Moore’s attorneys argued.
Prosecutors have maintained since Moore’s trial that they disqualified the jurors for reasons that had nothing to do with their race, and their situations were different from those of the white jurors, Department of Corrections attorneys responded.
Federal lawsuit dismissed
Meanwhile, a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit arguing death row inmates have a right to know more about the drugs that will kill them.
The lawsuit, filed last month by six death row inmates, challenged a state law that guarantees secrecy to whoever produces or sells lethal injection drugs to the state. Legislators expanded the secrecy law in 2023 in a successful bid to restock fatal drugs and restart executions.
Both Moore and Freddie Owens, who died last month, chose lethal injection as their method of execution instead of electrocution or firing squad.
Inmates should be allowed to know how the drugs are stored and tested, as well as when they expire, the inmates’ attorneys argued. Expired or improperly stored drugs could cause an inmate to suffer while they’re dying or fail to kill them, leaving them with lasting injuries, the attorneys said.
But a federal judge rejected those arguments.
“A death row inmate does not have a constitutional right to discover information pertaining to his execution,” U.S. District Judge Jacquelyn Austin wrote in her order posted Thursday.
Inmates have the right to decide which method of execution they prefer. But that doesn’t mean the state has to tell them anything other than which methods are available, Austin wrote. The attorneys failed to prove how state law prevented inmates from making a decision, she continued.
Under state law, “condemned prisoners remain allowed to choose the execution method they and their lawyers believe is best for them, using whatever criteria they prefer, based on all of the information available to them,” Austin wrote. “That is all that the right to elect their execution method provides.”
At the same time, she left the door open for other inmates to question exactly how much information officials must give about the drugs under the shield law.
Soon after an inmate receives their death warrant, Corrections Director Bryan Stirling must sign a statement saying whether the department is prepared to carry out executions by each of the three methods allowed under state law.
That includes testing the state’s supply of pentobarbital, a sedative that is fatal in high doses, to make sure it’s not contaminated or expired.
The state’s death penalty law gives inmates the right to have Stirling explain the process he used to determine the drugs would be effective in an execution, Austin wrote.
Stirling’s statement ahead of Owens’ execution won’t suffice for future executions, she wrote.
“Much could change from one execution to the next,” Austin’s order reads. “For example, SCDC could exhaust its supply of drugs; it could determine that its supply is too old or otherwise degraded to be adequate for use in future executions; there could be complications or problems conducting an execution; or new legal concerns could arise.”
At least four more executions are expected to be scheduled in the coming months. If any of those inmates challenge the drugs’ availability, Austin wrote, she “will be prepared to issue a prompt decision at the appropriate time,” she wrote.
Moore is the second condemned inmate in two months whose execution Austin declined to stop over questions about the drugs.
Last month, she declined to halt the execution of Freddie Owens. At the time, she wrote that Owens and his attorneys knew enough to choose the least painful option.
Attorney Lindsey Vann said she doesn’t plan to appeal Austin’s decision for Moore.
But attorneys for the other four inmates might.
“Given the long history of botched and inhumane executions seen across the country, South Carolina’s continued refusal to provide even the most basic information about its execution drugs is troubling,” attorney Courtney Farrell said in an email to the SC Daily Gazette. “We are in the process of reviewing the district judge’s decision with an eye toward bringing greater transparency to South Carolina’s use of the death penalty.”