Death penalty returning to state after 13 years

By Jack O’Toole

Statehousereport.com

After a 13-year hiatus, the state of South Carolina is planning to resume executions this week amid an ongoing debate about the fairness, expense and effectiveness of capital punishment.

According to an Aug. 30 S.C. Supreme Court order, six death row inmates, four of whom are black, have exhausted their appeals and can be executed by the state Department of Corrections (SCDC) at 35-day intervals. The men awaiting execution are: 

Four of the men awaiting execution are black, two are from Greenville, two are from Orangeburg and one each are from Spartanburg and Abbeville, which is part of the 8th Circuit that also covers Laurens County.

Steven Bixby, 57, is convicted of murdering two law enforcement officers – Abbeville County Sheriff’s Deputy Sgt. Danny Wilson and State Constable Donnie Outz – in 2003. He was convicted and sentenced to death in 2007. Two other Bixby family members involved in the 14-hour standoff that led to the officers’ deaths died in 2011.

“We are moving in the right direction to make a death sentence punishment that actually means something again for the most horrific of crimes in South Carolina,” said 8th Circuit Solicitor David Stumbo. “I am a career prosecuting attorney who often meets with families in the worst of circumstances, who have had a loved one brutally murdered. I hope to now be able to tell those families with confidence that, should we seek and secure a conviction and sentence of death from a trial jury, the sentence will be carried out and the perpetrator will have his life taken for the life that he maliciously took from the one that they loved.”

Others currently on death row include:

• Freddie Owens, 46, convicted of murdering Greenville convenience store clerk Irene Graves in 1997. Owens later admitted to killing a Greenville County cellmate as he awaited sentencing for Graves’s murder. Owens’s execution is scheduled for Sep. 20.

• Richard Moore, 59, convicted of murdering Spartanburg convenience store clerk James Mahoney during a robbery in 1999.

• Marion Bowman, 44, convicted of murdering 21-year-old Kandee Louise Martin in Orangeburg in 2002.

•  Brad Sigmon, 66, convicted of killing his girlfriend’s parents, Gladys and David Larke, in Greenville County in 2002.

• Mikal Mahdi, 41, convicted of murdering Orangeburg County Sheriff’s Office Captain James Myers in 2004.

First possible execution since 2011

If Owens’s sentence is carried out as scheduled, he will be the 44th South Carolinian put to death since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, and the first since Jeffrey Motts, who was executed for the murder of his cellmate, Charles Martin, in 2011. 

Since then, the state’s efforts to carry out death sentences have been stymied by pharmaceutical distributors’ hesitance to be seen providing drugs for use in lethal injections. To break the impasse, the S.C. General Assembly approved the legality of executions via the electric chair and then firing squads in 2021. Two years later, state lawmakers shielded drug providers from the risk of public exposure in 2023. 

“Justice has been delayed for too long in South Carolina,” Gov. Henry McMaster said in a September 2023 statement after notifying the courts that the S.C. Department of Corrections had obtained the necessary drugs and was prepared to resume lethal injections as the primary method of execution. “This filing brings our state one step closer to being able to once again carry out the rule of law and bring grieving families and loved ones the closure they are rightfully owed.”

But with new questions about the death penalty currently swirling, and public support for the method at a 30-year low, according to a recent Gallup poll, opponents say it’s time to end the practice.

“Our state has real problems,” ACLU-SC spokesman Paul Bowers told Statehouse Report in a Sept. 3 interview, “and we’d all benefit if our politicians put as much energy into keeping people alive as they do into killing them.”

S.C.’s death penalty by the numbers

South Carolina’s death penalty has long been plagued by questions of race, class, fairness, cost and more, as statistics maintained by the Death Penalty Information Center and South Carolinians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty demonstrate: 

• Race: 74% of South Carolinians executed since 1900 have been Black, as are more than half of those currently awaiting execution.

• Procedure: Since the 1976 Supreme Court reinstatement, 60% of S.C. death sentences have been overturned due to court errors and prosecutorial misconduct.

• Innocence: Two death row inmates, Michael Linder and Warren Manning, have been exonerated and released since 1981. With 43 executions since 1976, that’s about 1 out of every 22 men executed.

• Geography: Four counties—Lexington, Greenville, Horry and Spartanburg—account for 51% of the prisoners on death row, with Lexington County responsible for almost 20%.

• Cost: Every inmate on death row costs South Carolina taxpayers more than $400,000 per year. Nationally, a death sentence has been found to cost between two and three times as much as a sentence of life without parole due to dramatically higher legal and incarceration expenses.

Stumbo’s office also announced in February that the state will be seeking the death penalty in the trial of Joshua Dean Nix.

Nix is accused of murdering Crystal Dawn Rainey in August of 2023.

Rainey was found dead after being shot multiple times in her vehicle on Kerr Road in Greenwood.

Circuit Judge R. Lawton McIntosh of Anderson County has been appointed to preside over the case.

In a court filing, Stumbo cited two aggravating factors that influenced the decision to seek the death penalty – the murder of a witness or potential witness and the killing happening during a kidnapping and larceny with the use of a deadly weapon.

(Advertiser editor John Clayton contributed to this story.)