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Thread: South Carolina Capital Punishment News

  1. #31
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    The ultimate punishment: A look at death row in South Carolina

    By Christina Elmore
    The Post and Courier

    RIDGEVILLE — Heavily fenced in and guarded on the outskirts of Ridgeville lies Lieber Correctional Institution. Among the criminal offenders housed within are 40 inmates even more isolated than the rest.

    A monotonous existence awaits those condemned to the corridors of death row. Having committed the most egregious of crimes against others across the state, these men now spend the bulk of their time alone.

    They eat and sleep in single cells. The lucky ones get an hour of recreation time a day, often spent exercising or reaching through the bars that divide them to play a game of checkers with a neighboring inmate.

    “You rarely hear any of them talking about the death penalty or what they have coming up,” said the prison’s warden, Joseph McFadden. Those conversations are reserved for private talks with psychologists and clergymen who come to visit from time to time, he said.

    Forty-three state-ordered killings over the past four decades have earned South Carolina a ranking of seventh, per capita, among the 36 states that used the death penalty in that time, Death Penalty Information Center records show.

    Punishment does not come swiftly. Lengthy judicial hearings in the appellate process can take years, sometimes decades, to navigate. And it is costly — an estimated average of $1.1 million more than pursuing life without parole.

    The death-row inmates currently housed at Lieber have been in the Department of Corrections system an average of about 14 years, state records show. Meanwhile, the families they’ve victimized are left chasing closure, forced to relive their horrors with each new court date.

    This is the world of Marion Bowman, who, in 2001, shot a young Orangeburg mother to death with a .380-caliber pistol and set her remains on fire because she owed him money.

    And William Dickerson Jr., who burned a man, cut him 200 times, knocked out his teeth and sexually assaulted him with multiple objects before finally strangling him on James Island in 2006.

    And John Edward Weik, who in 1998 cut down his former girlfriend with shotgun blasts while her two children hid in a nearby bathroom at her home in Knightsville.

    And Jesse Sapp, who reportedly killed himself last week while awaiting a new sentence for killing a Highway Patrol trooper during a 2002 traffic stop on College Park Road, bringing an end to an appellate process that spanned 12 years.

    It’s the world that could await Dylann Roof if he’s convicted and sentenced to death in the killing of nine parishioners while they worshipped in June at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston.

    Ninth Circuit Solicitor Scarlett Wilson last month announced her intentions to seek the death penalty in the case, described by some as the deadliest hate crime in South Carolina’s history.

    “This was the ultimate crime,” Wilson said, “and justice from our state calls for the ultimate punishment.”

    Families wait

    Many watched and were touched by words of forgiveness uttered by families of the Emanuel victims during a bond hearing for Roof. Their faith, they said, is what gave them the strength to do so.

    That same faith prevents many of the families from supporting capital punishment, Wilson said while announcing her decision.

    Still, some others seek closure in the wake of tragedy through calls for the harshest possible penalty.

    “She didn’t deserve to lose her life,” said Cordelia Martin, the Orangeburg mother of the 21-year-old woman killed by Bowman.

    An execution won’t bring her daughter back, Martin said, but Bowman needs to be punished.

    “That’s the only way I’m going to get closure,” she said.

    Fourteen years have passed since Kandee Martin’s body was found in the trunk of a burned car in the woods of Dorchester County. But resolution in the case has escaped the woman’s family.

    The ordeal has been a source of constant stress for the grieving mother and her husband.

    “I don’t understand why it’s lasted this long,” she said.

    Bowman has repeatedly argued through appeals that he didn’t receive a fair trial, alleging, among other things, that a search of his home that netted evidence in the case wasn’t warranted. Attempts to overturn his conviction and sentence so far have failed.

    Keeping track of the numerous court proceedings over the years is a responsibility that has fallen on Martin’s husband. Standing in the same room as the man who stole her daughter’s life is something Martin said she can’t bring herself to do.

    “It just got to be too much for me,” she said.

    The convicted killer was someone her family had trusted. Bowman went to school with her children and worked for her husband, Martin said. If Kandee Martin had owed the man money, as Bowman had claimed in court, her parents would have paid had he come to them.

    “That’s no excuse to kill someone, especially a girl who’s just starting her life,” Martin said.

    Sitting through Bowman’s trial was a “horrible” experience for the woman.

    “He was sitting up there laughing and everything,” Martin said. “He was going to get off, he said. He was going to make it to biker’s weekend and everything.”

    A jury convicted Bowman on murder and third-degree arson charges in May 2002. Bowman’s cockiness was soon replaced with tears at the reading of his sentence, Martin said.

    But the family’s victory is now well over a decade old. A preliminary execution date for the man came and went.

    With no apparent end in sight, all Kandee Martin’s loved ones can do is wait.

    “It’s hard on me, it’s hard on her father and it’s hard on her brothers and sisters. She was a big part of our life. When he took her, he took a part of me,” Martin said. “They should have taken care of this.”

    The lengthy process

    After 16 years on death row, the fate of inmate John Edward Weik is even less certain.

    The state Supreme Court last year granted Weik a new sentencing hearing, citing concerns regarding the strength of his defense during his original trial. The decision put into question whether Weik will be put to death for his brutal attack on Susan Krasae, the mother of his child, or whether his penalty will be reduced to life behind bars.

    Former 1st Circuit Solicitor Walter Bailey notified Weik of his intentions to seek the death penalty in the summer of 1998.

    It was a decision he made roughly 20 times during his 11-year stint in office, he said.

    As a prosecutor, he said, pursuit of the ultimate punishment begins with familiarizing yourself with the harrowing details of the case.

    An “aggravating circumstance” is required by state law to heighten a homicide to that level. Kidnapping a victim, performing some act of torture or sexual assault, harming a child and killing during the commission of an armed robbery or burglary would all qualify, he said, among other factors.

    Bailey pored over the details contained in Weik’s file after Krasae’s death. When he was done, he said, he was certain that the slaying warranted capital punishment.

    “He killed her in cold blood. ... And he did it in a manner where the first shot would hurt her, but it wouldn’t be fatal,” Bailey said.

    Bailey served notice of his intentions with the family’s support and the facts on his side, he said.

    So when the state Supreme Court decided to vacate Weik’s sentence more than a decade later, he was left feeling somewhat confused, he said.

    During trial, defense attorneys presented multiple expert witnesses who attested to Weik’s mental health, which included a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia, auditory and visual hallucinations, suicidal ideations and paranoid delusions, a written Supreme Court opinion on the case read.

    The court was compelled, though, by the effect that being raised by an abusive father, who also suffered from mental illness, had on the killing, according to court documents.

    “Ninety percent of that opinion dealt with the mental status of Weik’s father. That was the most confusing aspect for me. Everyone knew he had mental health issues. The jury had that information beforehand,” Bailey said.

    The criticism that comes through the appellate process is necessary, Bailey maintained, despite the turn in the case.

    “Death penalty cases have a lot of scrutiny, and they ought to because there’s no going back once someone’s executed,” he said.

    He said the process often forces defense attorneys to build cases not based on what’s best for their clients but by what will satisfy an appellate court down the road.

    Of the 20-odd times that Bailey pursued capital punishment, he recalled roughly 14 of those cases ending in death penalty sentences. The amount seemed like a lot at the time, he said. The rate at which the sentence has been granted has steadily declined nationwide over the years.

    “The cases are just as bad now,” he said, “it’s just that the individual solicitor has the sole discretion. Some prosecutors have a tendency to do more of them than others do. It all depends,” Bailey said. “It’s very expensive and it’s very time-consuming. Those are the main reasons not to pursue it.”

    The death penalty cases he prosecuted, however, were worth the expense, he said.

    Asked whether the decision to pursue death has ever weighed heavy on his own conscious, Bailey responded that it’s not his decision alone to make.

    “I’ve got to convince 12 jurors and a judge. It takes 13 people to grant a death sentence,” Bailey said. “I haven’t had any regrets or lost any sleep.”

    Examining the system

    Ron Kaz, however, has spent the past 35 years actively fighting against capital punishment.

    The penalty, Kaz said, is one he can’t accept on principle. The James Island man co-chairs advocacy group South Carolinians Abolishing the Death Penalty.

    “I don’t think you can solve any problems by killing people,” he said. “Secondly, I don’t believe government has the right to be killing people. The whole idea of the death penalty is contrary to the idea of human rights.”

    In 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that laws surrounding capital punishment at the time were largely unconstitutional. New laws began to surface across the nation by 1976, to Kaz’s dismay, he said.

    “The way it’s been used in this country is so problematic, even people who support the death penalty need to think about what’s going on,” Kaz said. “The system is racist, classist, it doesn’t work, they don’t get the right people and it’s way more expensive than being sentenced to life. There are just so many problems with it, it’s ridiculous.”

    Of the 282 inmates killed by the state since 1912, 74 were white and 208 were black, according to the Corrections Department.

    A study on South Carolina’s death-penalty practices that was published in 2006 found racial disparities in the system. Of South Carolina’s homicides over a five-year period in the mid- to late 1990s, prosecutors sought the death penalty in 1.2 percent of cases involving a black defendant and a black victim compared with 9.7 percent of cases involving a black defendant and white victim, according to the study. Also, prosecutors sought the death penalty in 6.7 percent of cases involving a white defendant and white victim compared with 2.6 percent of cases involving a white defendant and black victim, the study found.

    For Isaac Unah, a professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill who coauthored the study, the results raised questions about the value placed on minority lives, both as offenders and victims.

    “It’s pretty striking when you think about it,” Unah said. “When I did this research, my motivation was not to go out there and help death-row inmates. It’s just an issue I think needed some critical examination.”

    More than 150 death-row inmates have been exonerated nationwide since 1976, Kaz said.

    “That’s an error rate of more than 10 percent. If one hot dog in every pack was no good, they’d stop selling those hot dogs,” Kaz said. “Yet we keep killing people, even though the record shows we can’t get it right.”

    Years of appeals do little to spare innocents caught in the system, he said.

    “What people don’t understand about the appellate process is that it’s designed to make sure the law is followed, not to make sure the person is guilty,” Kaz said. “They can go ahead and execute an innocent person as long as they follow the rules.”

    The average length of time it takes for a death row inmate to be exonerated is nine years, Kaz said.

    “If you speed up the process, then you increase the number of innocent people who are going to be executed. Every time you execute the wrong person, the guilty murderer is still running around out there,” Kaz said.

    Execution methods

    South Carolina’s execution chamber at Broad River Correctional Institution in Columbia — a gurney, backed by a brick wall and flanked by curtains with a glass window separating it from witness seating — has sat unused since 2011.

    The state’s supply of a drug cocktail used for lethal injection expired in 2013. In the meantime, South Carolina has no means of executing death-row inmates unless they agree to the state’s other allowed method: electrocution.

    Only three of the 39 death-row inmates put to death in South Carolina have opted for electrocution since lethal injection was brought into practice in 1995, Corrections Department records show.

    “We continue to look for alternatives and acquire the drugs used in our procedure,” Corrections spokeswoman Stephanie Givens said of the state’s status to address the situation.

    Until the issue is resolved, those condemned to death row remain at Lieber, biding their time under McFadden’s watchful eye as the clock winds down.

    For McFadden, death-row or not, the inmates under his charge are one and the same.

    “My approach is simple,” McFadden said. “Treat everyone with respect, but at the same time understand that I do have a job to do, and try to do it to the best of my ability.”

    South Carolina executions

    The state of South Carolina has carried out 282 executions since Aug. 6, 1912, according to the S.C. Department of Corrections. Before then, executions by hanging were carried out in each county. Of those killed, 74 were white and 208 black. All but two were men. The following table shows the frequency of executions:

    1912-20 47 (electrocution)

    1921-30 38 (electrocution)

    1931-40 68 (electrocution)

    1941-50 57 (electrocution)

    1951-60 24 (electrocution)

    1961-62 7 (electrocution)

    1985-86 2 (electrocution)

    1990 1 (electrocution)

    1991 1 (electrocution)

    1995 1 (lethal injection)

    1996 5 (lethal injection), 1 (electrocution)

    1997 2 (lethal injection)

    1998 7 (lethal injection)

    1999 4 (lethal injection)

    2000 1 (lethal injection)

    2002 3 (lethal injection)

    2004 3 (lethal injection), 1 (electrocution)

    2005 3 (lethal injection)

    2006 1 (lethal injection)

    2007 1 (lethal injection)

    2008 2 (lethal injection), 1 (electrocution)

    2009 2 (lethal injection)

    2011 1 (lethal injection)

    http://www.postandcourier.com/articl...ate-punishment

  2. #32
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Mike's Avatar
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    S.C. moves to conceal lethal injection drug suppliers

    COLUMBIA — South Carolina lawmakers are looking for a compromise in a bill that would render information about lethal injection drugs a secret, a change that may enable the state to resume executions.

    The state uses a three-drug protocol: pentobarbital, pancuronium bromide and potassium chloride. The corrections agency does not have the first two drugs and has not been able to acquire them.

    Officials believe S.553, which would conceal details of the drug procurement process, would make it easier for the state to acquire execution drugs. But on Thursday, a Senate committee held up the legislation without debating it, citing a need address the differences with the parties involved.

    Mandy Medlock, executive director of Justice 360, which opposes the bill, said the committee’s lack of approval, if only temporary, was a positive step. She was less hopeful about the prospect of finding common ground.

    “We’re interested in what everybody has to say, but it’s a very black and white issue. Either it’s a secret or it’s not,” said Medlock.

    After Bryan Stirling became S.C. Department of Corrections director in fall 2013, he was told the execution drugs had recently expired and no companies would sell them to the agency. The department is required to carry out the sentence of the court and has no position on the death penalty.

    Stirling said opponents have been “very successful” at obtaining information through open records laws and other legal means about the companies that supply the drugs. Activists then contact the companies on the issue, resulting in manufacturers refusing to sell specific drugs to corrections departments across the country.

    S. 553 would help South Carolina officials respond.

    “This would give us something that we can go to the companies and say, ‘Here is your protection. They will not target you,’” Stirling said in an interview Thursday. “It’s basically expanding the execution team, and saying the people that supply the drugs would be protected, also, along with the current execution team.”

    If the bill does not pass, Stirling said, “We’ll do everything we can to seek these drugs, but we’re running into roadblock after roadblock.”

    Laura Hudson, executive director of the S.C. Crime Victims’ Council, was dismayed by Thursday’s lack of progress.

    “A crime victim would never want the wrong person accused, much less put to death. But the longer you delay it (invokes) that old statement of ‘justice delayed is justice denied,’” she said.

    “You have to wait years and years and years and years before someone is finally put to death. The opposition is just another delay to not do the death penalty. We have the death penalty in this state. Exercise it.”

    Medlock said the extra week or so would allow constituents to engage in the debate.

    “The fact that it has been delayed gives us more time to let the public know that this is going on,” she said. “The public can contact the senators to let them know how they feel about it. … Some people might be in favor of the bill, but I think in general, folks are against the idea of the government keeping secrets from us.”

    The organization argues that keeping lethal injection drugs secret would result in a greater risk of botched executions, and that information needed for any investigation would be hidden. Additionally, it says S.553 would give special secret status to drug companies, stifling scrutiny and public debate.

    Justice 360 represents death row inmates and advocates for specific reforms aimed at addressing systemic flaws in the capital punishment process.

    http://www.blufftontoday.com/bluffto...s#.Vsnow8vSl9A
    "There is a point in the history of a society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly. Punishing somehow seems unfair to it, and it is certain that imagining ‘punishment’ and ‘being supposed to punish’ hurts it, arouses fear in it." Friedrich Nietzsche

  3. #33
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Mike's Avatar
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    Senators look to gas for execution

    South Carolina executions have long been carried out by lethal injection, with the electric chair as an option if inmates so choose.

    But two senators are proposing the Senate consider allowing nitrogen gas as a third option, one adopted last year by Oklahoma, because of the lack of lethal injection drugs available for executions nationwide.

    This is not the gas formerly used in some states' gas chambers, which in some cases involved botched and gruesome executions. In theory nitrogen gas would slowly deprive an inmate of oxygen but not suffocate them.

    Sen. Mike Fair, a Greenville Republican and chairman of the Senate Corrections and Penology Committee, has paired with Sen. Brad Hutto, an Orangeburg Democrat and defense lawyer, to propose using the gas as an alternative to a bill that would shield the identities of companies that sell lethal injection drugs to the state's prison agency.

    That bill drew a 7-7 vote last year, preventing it from moving to the floor.

    Fair said he plans to poll the bill out of committee Tuesday and propose the gas amendments to bypass the secrecy issue and give the Department of Corrections a working alternative once they are ordered to carry out an execution.

    "We think we have an avenue," Fair told The Greenville News. "What we don't know is how well we are going to be received by either caucus."

    Hutto said he is not a big fan of the death penalty, is not sure it is a deterrent but does understand from a victim's point of view that at least it stops that defendant from offending again.

    "Having said all that, if we are going to have a death penalty, we need one that is being administered in a humane way without any legal issues," he said. "The way we are headed with this bill trying to let companies hide behind a shield, that is asking for more lawsuits and more trouble."

    He said inmates could choose between gas or electrocution or lawmakers could do away with the electric chair.

    Lethal injection has become an issue nationwide in recent years as companies have refused to provide the necessary drugs and pharmacists have balked at putting themselves into such a public crossfire.

    As drug inventories expired, South Carolina's Department of Corrections has been unable to replace them.

    Inmates can choose to be electrocuted but can't be forced to under state law.

    So Fair and other lawmakers pushed a proposal to shield companies selling the drugs in hopes the secrecy would make them willing to provide the drugs.

    But the proposal stalled in both chambers. Lawmakers since have proposed alternatives, including a firing squad or making electrocutions mandatory.

    Fair and Hutto say the gas idea would be humane and could get lawmakers beyond arguments over secrecy.

    While Oklahoma lawmakers adopted nitrogen hypoxia as a backup method of execution last year, it has yet to be used in an execution.

    Lawmakers there envisioned a mask being placed over an inmate's head and pumped with the gas, which would not suffocate the inmate but gradually deprive them of oxygen, causing them first to lose consciousness and then to die, in theory without pain.

    Another type of gas, from hydrogen cyanide, was long used by some states in gas chambers. But some of those executions resulted in gruesome deaths and many states mothballed the devices in favor of lethal injection.

    Today, states are looking at alternatives to lethal injection unable to find the necessary drugs.

    Oklahoma, where an inmate took 43 minutes to die after a lethal injection in 2014, also was in search of an alternate method when the idea of nitrogen gas surfaced. The drug is relatively cheap and readily available from industrial suppliers.

    South Carolina last carried out an execution in 2011. Fair said the Attorney General's Office says the earliest an execution might again be carried out is later this year or early next year. Hutto said it could be several years.

    In any case, Fair said the bill to shield drug companies likely will receive an objection, a move that would take a two-thirds vote to overcome. But he said the amendments would focus the issue on allowing the state's prison agency to carry out the law instead of on a debate over secrecy and transparency.

    Hutto said he thinks the approach could work, though maybe not in this session.

    "I think it has a better chance of passing than the bill they're trying to pass," he said.

    http://www.thestate.com/news/state/article63262382.html
    "There is a point in the history of a society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly. Punishing somehow seems unfair to it, and it is certain that imagining ‘punishment’ and ‘being supposed to punish’ hurts it, arouses fear in it." Friedrich Nietzsche

  4. #34
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    Controversial bill proposed to get stalled SC executions back on track

    By John Monk
    The State

    COLUMBIA, SC - South Carolina, known as a tough-on-crime state, cannot put a condemned inmate to death nowadays – unless that inmate agrees to be executed using the electric chair.

    And the chances are slim to none that a death row inmate will chose the electric chair.

    After all, since 1996, only three of 38 S.C. death row inmates who were executed have chosen the electric chair. Under state law, an inmate must be put to death by lethal injection unless he chooses the electric chair, according to the S.C. Department of Corrections.

    And for now, lethal injections aren’t possible.

    That’s because under state law, the DOC must use fresh drugs when executing killers. But all the expiration dates have passed on the toxic drugs the department uses to execute the condemned. And there’s no easy way of getting new drugs. Drug companies are refusing to sell the state those chemicals.

    A bill proposed in the General Assembly could help get executions back on track, advocates say. But like the death penalty itself, it is not without controversy.

    The situation is well known to DOC director Bryan Stirling, who has been trying to buy the lethal drugs so the department can carry out an execution if ordered to by the S.C. Supreme Court.

    “When I took over the Department of Corrections in October 2013, I was briefed on many things I’d be doing, and one of those was executions,” Stirling said in an interview. “I was told our drugs had expired, and we were going to have a hard time obtaining the drug.”

    Since then, Stirling’s department has been trying to – even by going through compounding pharmacies.

    “Once we state what we want the drugs for, that we are the Department of Corrections, the conversation quickly ends,” Stirling said.

    “We even considered becoming a compounding pharmacy ourselves, but it just didn’t make a lot of sense to use tax dollars to buy something we could get for a lot less on the open market,” Stirling said.

    Legal challenges, protests and fear of bad publicity are the reason that pharmaceutical companies won’t sell the drugs, Stirling said.

    “Death penalty activists have been very good at stopping departments of corrections in states that have the death penalty from obtaining these drugs,” Stirling said.

    Since last year, Stirling has been working to get the chemicals. In 2015, he:

    ▪ Asked for and got an opinion from Attorney General Alan Wilson that said current state law already prohibits revealing the identity of an individual or company that provides the DOC with drugs. Still, Stirling said, no company will sell drugs to the DOC.

    ▪ Appeared before committees in the S.C. House and state Senate to inform them that the Department of Corrections is unable to carry out executions.

    ▪ Supported the introduction of bills introduced in the House and Senate that would shield the identities of companies that sell drugs to the DOC. If the bills were to become law, that extra layer of privacy assurance might help convince companies to sell lethal drugs to DOC, Stirling said.

    Georgia, Oklahoma and some other states have strong shield laws, and those states are carrying out lethal injection executions, Stirling said.

    Stirling calls the proposed law now in the Senate that would keep secret the identity of a company that sells lethal injection drugs to South Carolina a “shield” law. Death penalty foes calls it a “secrecy” law and say it goes against American traditions of open government.

    Currently, the bill – along with an amendment that would allow the state to use some kind of poisonous gas to put an inmate to death – is on the Senate floor.

    “We oppose this bill because if the State is going to carry out the ultimate punishment and take the life of one of its citizens, it should do so with transparency and accountability,” said Lindsey Vann, staff attorney with Justice 360, a Columbia-based non-profit that tracks and defends S.C. death penalty cases.

    Vann described the bill as “special-interest legislation designed to shield private sector drug companies from lawful criticism and to stifle public debate.”

    Such a law would also mean that any botched drug execution would effectively be a state secret, she said, because neither Gov. Haley nor the Legislature – not to mention the press and public – could investigate what happened in a botched drug execution.

    “The public could not even learn the cost of the drugs under this bill,” Vann said.

    Highly publicized botched executions in some other states are but one factor that have put America’s death penalty under increasing scrutiny. Meanwhile, according to polls, public support of the death penalty – especially when life in prison without parole is an alternative – has dropped.

    Nationwide, in 2015, there were only 29 executions – the lowest number since 1991, according to the national Death Penalty Information Center. In South Carolina, courts have only imposed the death penalty twice in the last five years, according to Justice 360.

    Since Stirling took office three years ago, his department has received no orders to execute an inmate.

    Currently, there are 42 inmates on South Carolina’s death row, all of whose cases are in various stages of appeal.

    Death penalty appeals are complex and time-consuming. An inmate’s appeals can last years and even decades. Four inmates have been on S.C.’s death row since the 1980s.

    According to the S.C. Attorney General’s office, which handles death penalty appeals, a number of the state’s 42 death row inmates have appeals that are well along. The earliest an execution could take place – if everything fell into place – would be this summer, spokesman J. Mark Powell said.

    However, it is common for judicial orders to derail upcoming executions, even in the final weeks or months of an inmate’s appeal.

    Justice 360 estimates it might be five years before South Carolina is able to execute a death row inmate.

    “The Attorney General’s office doesn’t set the timetable in these cases. We are moving as swiftly as the legal process allows,” Powell said.

    Once an inmate’s appeals are exhausted, the Attorney General’s office notifies the clerk of the state Supreme Court. That court then notifies DOC, which serves the inmate with the execution notice. Under state law, the inmate is put to death on the fourth Friday after being served.

    Stirling said, “It’s not my job to be either for or against the death penalty. I am simply the conduit to carry out the court’s order.”

    http://www.thestate.com/news/local/article64471007.html

  5. #35
    Administrator Moh's Avatar
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    September 3, 2016

    Future of executions in SC remains uncertain

    Like other prison systems across the country, the S.C. Department of Corrections can't purchase the drugs necessary to carry out lethal injections. That means executions in states that rely primarily on lethal injection are now in limbo for the foreseeable future.

    Carol Wright is hoping she lives long enough to see Marion Alexander Lindsey die.

    In September 2002, Wright's daughter, Ruby Nell Lindsey, was shot and killed by her estranged husband. Marion Lindsey had followed Ruby Nell as a friend raced her to the Inman Police Department, pulled up behind the car in the police department parking lot, and shot her through the window as she tried to hide in the back seat.

    An Inman officer who had arrived to help shot Lindsey, injuring him. But Ruby Nell died at the scene.

    Marion Lindsey was convicted of murder and sentenced to death.

    “There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t talk to her or think about her,” Wright said. “That was my baby. I’m trying my best to outlive him because I want to be there when they kill him.”

    Marion Lindsey, 42, has been sitting on South Carolina’s death row for 12 years, and it’s possible he will never be executed.

    Like other prison systems across the country, the S.C. Department of Corrections can't purchase the drugs necessary to carry out lethal injections. The drugs are not available in the United States, and European countries — which are strongly opposed to the death penalty — have refused to sell the drugs to American prisons.

    That means executions in states that rely primarily on lethal injection are now in limbo for the foreseeable future. The long appeals process associated with death penalty cases increases the likelihood that any stockpiled remaining drugs will expire, and few states have acted to reinstate other forms of execution, such as the electric chair or firing squad. While death penalty opponents have welcomed the shift, some victims' families, such as Carol Wright, feel their loved ones have been cheated of justice.

    South Carolina hasn’t executed anyone since 2011, and in 2013 one of the drugs in the state's supply that's needed for a lethal injection expired. Since then, corrections officials haven't been able to obtain the three-drug cocktail used in executions.

    “We’ve tried to go everywhere we could go, and because the anti-death-penalty groups have been so good at stopping this, they won’t sell us the drugs,” said Bryan Stirling, director of the state Department of Corrections. “Once we tell them we’re DOC, the conversation stops there.”

    Stirling said there are no scheduled executions at this time, but he said DOC officials still need to prepare as if one is going to take place.

    He testified before state House and Senate committees in hopes of getting a shield law passed that would have included drug companies as part of the state’s execution team, preventing anyone from learning the name of a company that sold lethal injection drugs to the DOC.

    Under South Carolina law, the identities of execution teams are protected. The proposed measure also would have shielded drug companies from litigation should anything go wrong during an execution.

    The shield law bill died during the General Assembly’s last session, said Sen. Glenn Reese, D-Spartanburg. Reese said the bill didn’t get enough votes to make it out of subcommittee.

    “Something is going to have to be done,” Reese said. "We're going to have to do it the right way, but who decides the right way? I think if something isn’t done, the death penalty will just go away. I think there will be more life sentences because (death sentences) can’t be administered properly.”

    Some attempts have been made to change the state's method of execution. State Rep. Joshua A. Putnam, R-Anderson, introduced a bill in April 2015 that would've allowed South Carolina to use firing squads to carry out executions. And state Sens. Mike Fair, R-Greenville, and Brad Hutto, D-Orangeburg, proposed a bill that would allow the state to use the gas chamber.

    But both bills died in committee, never reaching the floor.

    Uncertain fate

    Seventh Circuit Solicitor Barry Barnette said the state’s inability to procure lethal injections drugs won’t keep him from pursuing the death penalty when it's warranted.

    “It’s not going to change our evaluation system whatsoever,” Barnette said. “We’re going to keep doing evaluations for every case.”

    The decision to seek the death penalty isn't made lightly, he said.

    “Before we consider declaring the death penalty, we look through everything — the factors of each case,” Barnette said. “Looking at mine and (Trey Gowdy's) record, it’s some of the worst people we’ve ever dealt with.”

    The last death penalty case Barnette prosecuted was in 2014 against Ricky Blackwell Sr., who was convicted of killing 8-year-old Brooke Center in an act of revenge. Blackwell's ex-wife was dating Brooke’s father.

    Barnette talked extensively with the family, and they wanted to pursue the death penalty, he said. But that isn’t always the case.

    “Each case is different and the facts are different,” Barnette said. “The one thing we want to make sure of is that we are very deliberate in making sure we look at everything before we consider something like that.”

    Like some of the families he works with, Barnette is frustrated by the length of time between a death sentence and an execution. Families who want the death penalty pursued need to see justice, Barnette said.

    Long road

    One reason death sentences aren't carried out more frequently is they often involve lengthy appeals. Death penalty trials essentially require perfection from the judge, defense attorneys and the prosecutors, said U.S. Rep. Trey Gowdy, a former Seventh Circuit solicitor. Even the smallest mistake discovered during the appeals process can result in a new trial, he said.

    Gowdy said a capital murder trial also is exponentially more expensive than a standard murder trial. There are more lawyers, more legal filings and more pre-trial maneuverings with a capital murder trial, Gowdy said. When the trial does start, it often lasts longer than a regular murder trial, costing taxpayers millions.

    The appeals process alone can take decades. When he was solicitor, Gowdy said he told victims' families who wanted the death penalty that "most of us will not live long enough to see this sentence carried out." Gowdy said he had prosecuted seven or eight death penalty cases, and none of them are close to being carried out.

    Lindsey's case, for instance, is still in the state appellate process, according to the state Attorney General's Office.

    “It’s a really high standard, and it should be when the state is taking someone’s life, but it shouldn't be impossible,” Gowdy said.

    Over the course of about 20 years, Gowdy said, groups opposed to the death penalty have managed to make the process cost prohibitive and nearly impossible to carry out. Gowdy said he gives death penalty opponents credit for "playing long ball" in their efforts to end the death penalty.

    "At the end of that (trial), if the drug isn't available to carry out the jury's verdict, the anti-death penalty folks have another victory," Gowdy said.

    Waning support?

    Ron Kaz, board chairman of South Carolinians Abolishing the Death Penalty, said he’s been a death penalty opponent for 30 years, and he has seen a steady decline in support for executions. He believes that’s why alternative methods and shield law proposals are failing. People aren’t as interested in the topic as they once were, he said.

    When he first started going to executions, Kaz said there would be "big rowdy crowds" of people supporting the death penalty and smaller groups protesting it. In the recent executions he's attended, Kaz said no death penalty supporters were present.

    “Basically, it’s no longer the really hot button issue it used to be,” Kaz said. “I think a lot of people in government would like to see it fade away. I see the support diminishing, but this is another example of the leaders in the legislature not leading. They’re pushing for other alternatives.”

    Diann Rust-Tierney, executive director of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, said the group is focused on educating the public on the problems with the death penalty, rather than the methods of execution.

    Rust-Tierney said the death penalty now is confined to a smaller number of jurisdictions, which suggests it may be nearing extinction.

    “I think that the future of executions is we’re not going to have any,” Rust-Tierney said. “From our perspective, the future is we’re going to finally come to grips with the fact this isn’t working.”

    The public needs to be concerned about states that are pushing for alternative methods of execution or lobbying for shield laws, Rust-Tierney said.

    “At the end of the day, the challenge with the death penalty is about government accountability,” Rust-Tierney said. “We’ve been trying to do this for 40 years, and it isn’t working.”

    But for victims' families, the issue is simply about seeing justice served. Wright is frustrated that Marion Lindsey has so many appeals left, and said she didn't realize the process would take so long. She said it makes her angry that even if his appeals ended tomorrow, he would still sit on death row because the lethal injection drugs aren't available.

    And the possibility that Lindsey may never be held accountable for killing her daughter is hard to bear.

    “I’m trying to outlive him, and he’s getting better health care than I am,” Wright said. “I don’t think the death penalty goes fast enough. He should’ve been dead already.”

    http://www.goupstate.com/news/201609...ains-uncertain

  6. #36
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    Lethal drugs unavailable, lawmakers weigh options for SC executions

    BY CYNTHIA ROLDÁN
    The State

    South Carolina has no way of executing its more than 30 death row inmates, and state legislators are exploring how to fix that.

    A Senate panel discussed Thursday looking into alternatives to lethal injection, the method the state most commonly used until the last set of drugs expired in 2013. Since then, the state has had no way of executing any of the 38 inmates on death row unless they choose to die by electrocution.

    Bryan Stirling, director of the Department of Corrections, said the agency has been unable to obtain alternative drugs, because pharmaceutical companies that compounded them in the past have received a lot of outside pressure to end the practice.

    During the hearing, several alternative methods of execution – from lethal gas to firing squads to morphine – were discussed. Sen. William Timmons, R-Greenville, suggested using fentanyl – an illegal, synthetically produced opioid that is often laced with heroin – that is seized by police.

    “We need to make sure that these products are effective and don’t cause cruel and unusual punishment,” Stirling said. “We need to be careful how we do this.”

    Stirling said he has looked into having the agency compound the drugs, but the most recent estimate placed the cost at about $1 million. He suggested the Legislature pass a “shield law,” which would guarantee secrecy to pharmacies that provide the state with the drugs needed for lethal injections.

    Even then, the Corrections Department would have to count on a drug company’s willingness to accept the shield law, said Sen. Brad Hutto, D-Orangeburg.

    “You’re in a difficult spot,” Hutto told Stirling. “You’ve been given a task that you can’t carry out.”

    The state’s longest-serving death row inmate, Fred Singleton, cannot be executed until he is declared mentally fit to face a sentencing trial. He was initially sentenced to death in 1983 for the rape and murder of a Newberry teacher.

    There are no pending orders to execute an inmate. The majority of cases involving inmates slated for execution are in litigation. The last inmate to be executed in South Carolina was 36-year-old Jeffrey Motts in 2011.

    As it was in Motts’ case, any of the state’s death row inmates could “volunteer” to be executed by dropping all appeals. After that, the corrections department would have no way of carrying out the execution unless the inmate chooses electrocution.

    If an inmate suddenly volunteers for the death chamber, Stirling said he doesn’t know what would happen without the needed drugs.

    “We’re in a place that we’ve never been before with lethal injection, electrocution and death penalty,” Stirling said. “If we can’t carry it out, we can’t carry it out.”

    BY THE NUMBERS:

    38 male inmates are on death row
    17 death row inmates are white
    21 death row inmates are African-American
    2011: The most recent year the state executed a death row inmate
    2014: The last time an inmate was added to the death row list

    http://www.myrtlebeachonline.com/new...#storylink=cpy

  7. #37
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    The business of securing death sentences: 40 years and 28 men

    In his four decade career, district attorney Donnie Myers was a powerhouse of the death penalty in the US – here is his exit interview after retiring earlier this year

    By Ed Pilkington
    The Guardian

    In September of 1996, Donnie Myers received a letter from one of the many men he had put on death row.

    It came from a multiple murderer named Michael Torrence who was soon to be executed and before he died had an unusual final request: let me talk face-to-face, he asked, with the man who secured my death sentence.

    Myers, a district attorney in Lexington County, South Carolina, thought about it for a while, then made the similarly unorthodox decision to accept the invitation. He made his way over to the state’s death row and sat down with the condemned man for several hours, as Torrence recounted his killings and the motivation behind them.

    “He told me that when he went about killing a person, he didn’t think about the consequences, he didn’t care,” Myers recalled. “He said he had a job to do, killing someone, and that was all he concentrated on.”

    The chilling conversation made a deep impression on Myers, and got him thinking about all the other killers he had dealt with. “I kind of got the feeling that the other ones I prosecuted felt the same way. I really believe that when someone sets about taking another human being’s life, like he told me, they don’t care about anything else. That was his job, and he had to carry it out.”

    It was an extraordinary conversation on several levels. The strangest and most poignant aspect of it was that Torrence’s insights into the psychology of killing, might also be applicable to the cold machinery of the death penalty.

    For the past 40 years, Donnie Myers has been oiling the wheels of that machine in his corner of the American South, achieving capital convictions on a scale almost unparalleled in the modern era. He was determined, laser-like and fearsomely effective.

    Securing death sentences was his job, and he had to carry it out.

    When the Guardian suggested to Myers that his approach to putting defendants on death row bore similarities to the cold precision expressed by Torrence, he replied: “I believe in enforcing the law and, based on the crime, that justice be served.”

    From 1977, when he took up his post as chief prosecutor (or solicitor as it is known locally) in Lexington County, until his retirement earlier this year, Myers put no fewer than 28 men onto death row, six of whom have been executed in the electric chair or by lethal injection. In all, he presided over more than 40 capital trials, and secured 39 death sentences (some of the men were tried twice).

    That breathtaking output puts Myers in an elite class of prosecutors who have been the powerhouse of the death penalty in the US. He was profiled last year in the Fair Punishment Project’s report, America’s Top Five Deadliest Prosecutors, which noted that the members of this “notorious group” had collectively wielded an outsized influence.

    His prolific dedication to capital cases also earned him exotic nicknames, such as Doctor Death and Death Penalty Donnie. He resents the tags. “The media has to come up with nicknames as publicity, but I would not give myself those labels,” he said.

    Despite the controversy that has dogged Myers, he agreed to give the Guardian an exit interview, looking back over his career that ended with retirement in January. Over two hours, the former prosecutor opened a door onto the thinking of an individual whose business was to arrange, judicially speaking, the killing of prisoners, reflecting on what it takes to send 28 men to death row.

    The interview took place over lunch in the Broadway theatre district of Manhattan where Myers was enjoying a post-retirement vacation. It was a fitting location, given his legendary theatricality in the courtroom.

    “I’m known for getting really emotional in closing arguments,” Myers said. “They are emotional cases. I put myself in the victim’s shoes – I’m their mouthpiece. I’m speaking for a person that I didn’t know, someone in the grave.”

    That emotionality led to some highly controversial performances in front of the jury. One of the more thespian came at the trial of Robert Northcutt, who in 2001 murdered his four-month-old daughter Breanna because she wouldn’t stop crying.

    Myers said that he set himself the task of “putting the jurors in the place of that victim. I wanted them to see what he had done to that baby. I wanted them to relive the crime, to go through what the victim did. So, yeah, I got highly emotional about that”.

    To achieve that goal, the prosecutor brought into the courtroom the actual crib in which the baby’s body had been found. He draped it with a large black shroud and wheeled it around in front of the jury in simulation of a funeral procession.

    Then he produced a toy doll and bent its back over the rail of the crib to show how the defendant had broken Breanna’s back. “He had bent her around til the back of her head touched the back of her feet, and that offended me,” Myers told the Guardian.

    In his closing summary, the prosecutor scolded the 12 men and women of the jury, telling them that if they gave Northcutt a life sentence rather than death that would be to “kick the baby some more”. He also opined that anything less than a capital sentence would declare “open season on babies in Lexington County”.

    As he spoke, the prosecutor cried 16 times. What he did not tell the court, but did reveal to the Guardian, was that to supercharge his address to the jury he had tucked into the crib a sheet belonging to his own son Chris, who had died of a genetic condition seven months previously.

    “My son had just died, and I used his sheet on that crib, so that was part of the emotion too. It was part of finding emotion in the moment.”

    Myers achieved his ambition: Northcutt was sent to death row. But it was a Pyrrhic victory in that the supreme court of South Carolina later overturned the sentence on grounds that he had been “overly zealous” in his closing summary. The prisoner is now back on death row after he was given a fresh resentencing trial.

    David Bruck, a professor at Washington and Lee University school of law who represented Northcutt at the trial, has followed Myers’ career closely over many years. He credits the prosecutor with being a very good lawyer who knew exactly how to appeal to the typical juror from Lexington, an overwhelmingly white county which the Daily Caller has ranked as the 37th most conservative in the nation.

    “He worked juries very hard, there was no trick too dirty,” Bruck said. “It was as though he had won a raffle that allowed him to hunt really big game; that’s what death penalty cases were for him – hunting really big human game.”

    There were plenty of tricks that Myers accumulated along the way. In the capital trial of Joseph Ard, who was convicted in 1996 of killing his unborn child after he shot his pregnant girlfriend, the prosecutor screened pictures in the courtroom of a fetus dressed up for a funeral. (That sentence was later overturned too, and Ard released, after the shooting was found to be unintentional.)

    When Johnny Brewer defended himself at trial for the 1994 strangling of his sister-in-law, Myers devised a clever way to unsettle the defendant by leaving a Photoshopped image of Brewer strapped to the electric chair in his line of sight within the courtroom. “He got upset about that,” Myers said.

    And in the case of Ron Finklea, who was prosecuted in 2007 for shooting a security guard in a robbery, then dousing him with petrol and setting him ablaze, Myers ignited a fire-starter right in front of the jury benches. “I talked to the women in the jury,” he recalled. “I said, ‘You know when you’re cooking and you touch that stove and oh man! it hurts. Just imagine your whole hand is on fire.’ I talked about burning flesh, the smell and the pain.”
    Finklea is on death row awaiting execution.

    But the case that stands out for Myers’ critics is that of Johnny Bennett, a black man who was sentenced to death in 1995 by an all-white jury. In the course of his summing up, Myers described Bennett as a “beast of burden”, “brutal monster”, “mountain man” and “caveman”.

    He warned the jury that if they gave the defendant a life sentence rather than death he would eventually find his way back into society, and “meeting him again will be like meeting King Kong on a bad day”.

    For good measure he informed the court that he had discovered that Bennett was having sex on death row with a female prison guard who the prosecutor described as “the blonde-headed lady” (the guard was white). The raising of the old Southern shibboleth of white women having sex with black men left a federal judge and the US fourth circuit court of appeals with no doubt: Myers had played to deep-rooted stereotypes and with his King Kong remark made a “poorly disguised appeal to racial prejudice”.

    The court threw out Bennett’s death sentence, and the prisoner is now facing a retrial. This was just one of more than 20 reversals to Myers’ convictions in the higher courts, at least four of them for improper closing arguments.

    The Guardian asked Myers over lunch to explain his intentions in the Bennett case. Had he been “infecting” the trial with racial animus as the federal judges had concluded?

    The prosecutor rejected the idea that his description of the “blonde-headed lady” was racially loaded, insisting that the phrase could be applied equally to African Americans as to white people. “Maybe the judges should have visited downtown Columbia.

    Do you know how many black women have different colored hairs in the South – I see almost as many blondes as I see anything else.”

    He also denied that describing a black man to an all-white jury as King Kong was remotely problematic. “Bennett is 6ft 8in and weighs 300lbs, does one-armed pushups. The guy he killed with 70 stabs of a Phillips-Head screwdriver was 5ft 6in and weighed 140. I was just showing the difference between them.”

    Can you see why somebody would see the portrayal as racist, the Guardian inquired.

    “No, I can’t. I’ve never thought of King Kong as a black person.”

    But a running theme of racist literature over the years, especially in the Deep South, has been to liken black people to primates.

    “I’ve never heard in South Carolina or anywhere a black person described as King Kong,” he said.

    John Blume, a professor at Cornell law school who represented Bennett in his later appeals, begged to differ: “That’s preposterous, it’s ridiculous. This was clearly an appeal – and none too subtle – to jurors in implicit and explicit racial biases.”

    The enduring mystery about Donnie Myers is why he did it. Why did he go to such extraordinary lengths to throw so many men to their judicial deaths? And how did he cope with the moral burden of arguing for human beings to be killed?

    It is at this point in the lunch that his answers grow eerily similar to those of Michael Torrence, the multiple murderer he spoke to shortly before his execution, in terms of their icy detachment. For someone who cried frequently in closing statements, Myers is strikingly cool when discussing the moral impact his work had on him.

    “I never give defendants recognition,” he said when asked how he summoned the strength to call for the death of a man who at the time was sitting just a few feet away from him in the courtroom. “I don’t look at them. They don’t need my attention – the person who does is not in the courtroom, and that’s the victim.”

    Myers compared the personal stress of sending people to death row to the vagaries of college football. “I played a lot of sports at the University of South Carolina, I went there on a football scholarship. Capital cases are more draining than the worst football practice I’d ever gone through.”

    He added that when a capital case was under way “there’s not a moment when you can relax, sleep is not very restful and you just keep going at it every day of the week, including Saturdays and Sundays”.

    When you ask a prosecutor how they feel about putting 28 men on death row, you don’t expect the answer to be that the hours are terrible.

    Myers insisted that he is not over zealous about the punishment. It was for other people to think about whether judicially killing prisoners is a good or bad idea, his job was just to carry out they decided. “If South Carolina didn’t have a death penalty law it wouldn’t affect me,” he said.

    Did he ever have any doubts about what he was doing?

    “No. There never was a doubt with any of these trials. If there was the slightest hesitation I wouldn’t go forward. I do what the law says you have to do. I look at the type of crime that was committed and the person who committed it, I put all that together, then think about the appropriate thing to do. It has to fit within the law.”

    It was his job, and he had to carry it out.

    Defense lawyers who went up against Myers in court find the argument that he was just following the law hard to swallow. They point out that there is nothing in state or federal law that requires prosecutors to seek death penalties, as the decision is left entirely to their better judgment. “So for Myers to say he was just applying the law is simply not true,” Bruck said.

    As a result of Myers’ enthusiasm for the ultimate punishment, Lexington County became a major supplier of the inhabitants of death row. Under his leadership, the county achieved an astonishingly high ratio between death sentences and murders.

    Lexington recorded an average rate of 6.80 death sentences per 100 murders compared with just 0.53 per 100 murders in neighboring Richland County, which covers inner-city Columbia despite its much higher incidence of homicide. The vast disparity makes a mockery of the death penalty as a uniform element of justice.

    The point was made most vividly in a study of South Carolina which highlighted the case of Raymond Patterson. He was put on death row by Myers for a 1985 murder committed in a parking lot in Lexington County. Had the shooting happened just three parking spots away, it would have fallen in Richland County, and Patterson would in all probability have been spared a death sentence.

    Stephen Breyer, the US supreme court justice, powerfully drew on these fundamental inequalities in his famous abolitionist rallying cry in 2015. “The imposition of the death penalty heavily depends on the county in which a defendant is tried,” he wrote, going on to conclude “that the death penalty is imposed arbitrarily.”

    At his retirement in January, several hundred people came to shout Donnie Myers out. It was the end of an era, in more ways than one.

    “I am happy to be retired,” Myers said. “I will never have to try another death penalty case.”

    He quits the profession with seven of the men he personally escorted to death row still sitting where he put them, awaiting the death chamber. What does he think should happen to them now that he has left his post and is a normal citizen once again?

    “Normal! Nobody’s called me normal before,” he laughed.

    And then he said: “I think they should get on with it. The jury set the sentence, I think it’s time for it to be carried out.”

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...south-carolina
    "I realize this may sound harsh, but as a father and former lawman, I really don't care if it's by lethal injection, by the electric chair, firing squad, hanging, the guillotine or being fed to the lions."
    - Oklahoma Rep. Mike Christian

    "There are some people who just do not deserve to live,"
    - Rev. Richard Hawke

    “There are lots of extremely smug and self-satisfied people in what would be deemed lower down in society, who also deserve to be pulled up. In a proper free society, you should be allowed to make jokes about absolutely anything.”
    - Rowan Atkinson

  8. #38
    Administrator Aaron's Avatar
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    S.C. lawmakers consider electrocuting death row inmates if lethal injection drugs unavailable

    COLUMBIA — South Carolina lawmakers are considering a proposal that would allow the state to execute death row inmates using the electric chair — something that hasn't been done since 2008 — if lethal injection drugs are not available.

    Under current law, criminals sentenced to the death penalty in South Carolina can choose to die by lethal injection or electrocution.

    Like other states, South Carolina has not had access to the necessary drugs to attempt a lethal injection since the last of its stock expired in 2013. That has left the state unable to carry out the ultimate punishment.

    Due to legal challenges, no death row inmate has been executed here in six years.

    Part of the problem is a nationwide shortage of sodium thiopental, an anesthetic that is part of the three-drug cocktail used in lethal injections. Companies internationally have stopped producing it, partially fearful of legal ramifications and ethical concerns.

    A bill proposed by state Sen. William Timmons, R-Greenville, discussed in subcommittee Wednesday, would allow the state to electrocute death row inmates if those drugs remain unavailable, even if they elect for lethal injection.

    Timmons emphasized that this debate is not over whether the death penalty should continue to exist in South Carolina, but rather how to ensure that laws on the books remain effective.

    “I’m not changing any options, I’m just changing the way we’re operating within the legal structure,” he said.

    The panel adjourned without reaching a conclusion on the legislation because it is waiting on further information from Attorney General Alan Wilson's office about how many inmates have already made their choice.

    There are 35 people currently on death row in South Carolina. One execution scheduled as recently as December had to be postponed.

    Gov. Henry McMaster has also called on the Legislature to pass a "shield law," which would allow companies to sell the drugs to the state confidentially in order to avoid public scrutiny. Lawmakers are considering that measure, too.

    The last use of the electric chair in South Carolina came in the June 2008 execution of James Earl Reed, who was convicted in 1996 for murdering his ex-girlfriend's parents. Reed chose the electric chair, a move that no inmates have made since.

    There is evidence that the shortage of the needed drugs is affecting the court system. Eighth Circuit Solicitor David Stumbo told the panel Wednesday that uncertainty has complicated the jobs of prosecutors because they cannot assure families the death penalty will actually get carried out if sentenced.

    "If we're going to have it, it needs to be effective," Stumbo said.

    Tom Lucas, whose son Brian was killed by Todd Kohlhepp in 2003, said the extensive delays in execution and repeated appeals cause ongoing stress for families of victims.

    Kohlhepp's crimes were discovered after a woman was found chained inside a shipping container on his property near Spartanburg last year. He eventually admitted to multiple killings.

    "Sometimes we feel as victims that the inmate has more rights than we have, and I think that's really, really ridiculous and it has to change," Lucas said. "We feel like we don't have a voice."

    Seventh Circuit Solicitor Barry Barnette ultimately decided not to pursue the death penalty after Kohlhepp pleaded guilty last year to seven South Carolina murders, citing concerns from families that the case would get repeatedly re-litigated and drawn out.

    The last execution in South Carolina was carried out in 2011. Jeffrey Motts, 36, was convicted of murdering his cellmate in 2005 at Perry Correctional Institution. Motts had been serving two life sentences for the murders of two of his family members at the time.

    In 1995, Sylvester Adams became the first inmate to die by lethal injection in South Carolina. The 39-year-old was convicted in the 1979 killing of a teenage neighbor. According to media reports at the time, state officials intentionally set his execution for 1 a.m., to discourage death penalty opponents and supporters from showing up.

    Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey, R-Edgefield, said he expects the group to resume discussions soon.

    "I think some of the attention over the last couple of months has educated a lot of legislators about just how big of an issue it is," Massey said. "So I'm hopeful something is going to pass because I think people more so now than before recognize the immediacy of the problem."

    https://www.postandcourier.com/polit...4c785557e.html
    Don't ask questions, just consume product and then get excited for next products.

    "They will hurt you. They will hurt your grandma, these people. The root cause of this is there's no discipline in the homes, they don't go to school, you know, they live off the government, no personal accountability, and they just beat people up for no reason, and it's disgusting." - Former Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters

  9. #39
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Mike's Avatar
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    SC Bill Would Shield Execution-Drug Companies From Public

    By MEG KINNARD

    Associated Press

    COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — The identities of companies that sell execution drugs to South Carolina would be protected under a bill proposed by a state lawmaker on Tuesday.

    Spartanburg Rep. Eddie Tallon told The Associated Press that the bill he's filing will make drug suppliers part of the execution team, so that just like employees in the death chamber who carry out the sentence, the companies' identities will be shielded by state law.

    Public pressure has made pharmaceutical companies reluctant to sell drugs knowing they'll be used to end lives, not save them. Nearly a dozen states have passed laws providing secrecy for suppliers in response.

    "If South Carolina is going to have the death penalty, then we need to have a way to carry it out," Tallon told the AP.

    Lawmakers have been looking for ways to carry out executions since the state's supply of lethal injection drugs expired in 2013. The state has not conducted any executions since 2011, in part because the drugs have not been available.

    Another possibility is empowering the state to electrocute inmates when the drugs aren't available. Currently, inmates can only be electrocuted if they request that method. South Carolina last used electrocution in 2008, to put James Earl Reed to death for the 1996 killing of his ex-girlfriend's parents.

    Corrections Director Bryan Stirling has warned repeatedly in legislative testimony that the state can't obtain the drugs it needs without such secrecy.

    Gov. Henry McMaster made the same point last year after the state Supreme Court scheduled a Dec. 1 execution for 52-year-old Bobby Wayne Stone, who is on death row for killing a Sumter County sheriff's deputy in 1996. McMaster said the state couldn't carry it out due to a lack of lethal injection drugs, and called on lawmakers to shield their identities so that executions could resume.

    "It's their decision on whether or not we have the death penalty," Stirling told the AP. "It's just my job to make sure we have ways to carry it out."

    https://www.usnews.com/news/best-sta...es-from-public

  10. #40
    Administrator Aaron's Avatar
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    Now this is the bill to support. Not the electric chair one. This could help SC the same way it helped VA. I'm sure that the state could find midazolam if a secrecy law is passed.
    Don't ask questions, just consume product and then get excited for next products.

    "They will hurt you. They will hurt your grandma, these people. The root cause of this is there's no discipline in the homes, they don't go to school, you know, they live off the government, no personal accountability, and they just beat people up for no reason, and it's disgusting." - Former Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters

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