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.

  • RalphWolf@lemmy.ca
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    24
    ·
    3 months ago

    And now he’s dead.

    What the hell is wrong with those people?!? If there’s any doubt, then pause the execution.

    • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      7
      ·
      3 months ago

      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.

      • zarkanian@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        5
        ·
        3 months ago

        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.

    • InvertedParallax@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      6
      ·
      3 months ago

      They’re Christian Nationalists who believe the bible must be taken literally!

      Therefore they are strictly pro-life (before birth), they believe he who has sin must cast the first stone, and those moneylenders must be worshipped as the job-creators they are!

      • aesthelete@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        6
        ·
        edit-2
        3 months ago

        They’re Christian Nationalists who believe the bible must be taken literally!

        Literalism is always a fraud because every written work of length contradicts itself and/or leaves room for interpretation. Language is imprecise and a lot of these works were also translated which allows even more opportunity for interpretation.

        • InvertedParallax@lemm.ee
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          3
          ·
          edit-2
          3 months ago

          I mean, also it was a time when we didn’t have any science at all, so believing magical spirits and all powerful invisible sky-men control the world are get angry when you masturbate is just as reasonable as the germ theory of disease and the laws of thermodynamics.

          But it’s like having an imaginary friend: Fine when you’re a child, but after a while, you might just have psychiatric issues.

        • InvertedParallax@lemm.ee
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          3 months ago

          And 73 virgins didn’t come from the Qur’an, it came from some Imam who wanted political power so he sold his followers as soldiers to as rising potential Caliph.

          Ignorant people rewrite their religion to match their personal views, in fact the bible was completely rewritten by Constantine to support the Roman empire and convince Christians that it was truly Christian to fight and die for him.