South Carolina Set to Execute First Inmate in Over 13 Years

South Carolina will execute its first prisoner in over 13 years after pharmaceutical companies began supplying the state with lethal injection medications.

Associated Press reports that for many years, companies refused to supply drugs to the state because they were afraid their names would be made public. However, state legislators amended the law to protect the anonymity of drug suppliers in May.

CNN reported that the South Carolina Supreme Court ruled in July to allow the return of executions. This includes electric chairs and firing squads as options.

The South Carolina Daily Gazette reported that the state’s first death sentence since 2011 will go to 46-year-old Freddie Eugene Owens. Owens is scheduled to die on September 20, 1997, for the murder of Irene Graves. Graves was a single mother with three children who worked the overnight shift in a Greenville County gasoline station at the time Owens robbed the gas station.

The outlet reported that Owens, his friends, and Graves were on a Halloween night robbery when Graves was shot in the head. “She had said she didn’t know the combination of the Safe at the Speedway Gas Station,” it stated.

Owens killed his cellmate in the Greenville County Jail on the day following his 1999 conviction for murder.

He confessed to the second murder at his sentencing the following day and said: “I did it really because I was wrongly accused of murder.”

Owens is fighting the death penalty but he has exhausted all his appeals. He has been resentenced three times to death.

The AP reported that his attorney has yet to receive a sworn declaration from prison officials about the “purity and potency” of the deadly drug.

Lawyer John Blume, who represents people on death row, told the outlet that “the lack of transparency regarding the source of execution drugs, their acquisition, and whether they can produce a painless death is still causing grave concern for the lawyers.”