Just days before inmate Freddie Owens is set to die by lethal injection in South Carolina, the friend whose testimony helped send Owens to prison is saying he lied to save himself from the death chamber.
Owens is set to die at 6 p.m. Friday at a Columbia prison for the killing of a Greenville convenience store clerk in 1997.
But Owens’ lawyers on Wednesday filed a sworn statement from his co-defendant Steven Golden late Wednesday to try to stop South Carolina from carrying out its first execution in more than a decade.
Prosecutors reiterated that several other witnesses testified that Owens told them he pulled the trigger. And the state Supreme Court refused to stop Owens’ execution last week after Golden, in a sworn statement, said that he had a secret deal with prosecutors that he never told the jury about.
Honestly, I don’t know. I wish I knew. I want to understand my opponents even if just to understand how best to fight them, but this just seems so blatantly evil I can’t understand it.
This attitude is what scares me even more than the Christian nationalist terrorism and bigotry. Because this blase approach to formal state sanctioned execution is how very evil people start moving the country towards a comfort with “if the government executed them then they deserved it”. We must remember that Holocaust began with criminals. I just don’t trust the government to kill anyone, and this right here is part of why.
As one of his last actions before leaving office, Donald Trump fast-tracked 13 federal executions. It’s like he wanted to kill as many people as he possibly could.