The state of South Carolina is set to execute its first convict in more than 13 years after pharmaceutical companies resumed supplying it with lethal injection drugs.
Companies refused to sell the drugs to the state for several years due to concerns that sales would have to be disclosed to the public, but state legislators changed the law in May to keep the names of the drug providers anonymous, according to the Associated Press (AP).
In July, South Carolina’s Supreme Court decided to permit the resumption of executions, which also includes the electric chair and firing squad as options, CNN reported.
The state’s first execution since 2011 will be of 46-year-old Freddie Eugene Owens, who is scheduled to be put to death on September 20 for the 1997 murder of Irene Graves, a single mother of three who was working the overnight shift at a Greenville County gas station when Owens robbed it, the South Carolina Daily Gazette reported.
Owens and his friends were on a robbery spree on Halloween night when he shot Graves in the head “after she said she did not know the combination to the safe at the Speedway gas station,” the outlet stated.
The day after Owens was convicted of murder in 1999, he also killed his cellmate at the Greenville County Jail.
At his sentencing hearing the next day, he confessed to the second killing and said, “I really did it because I was wrongly convicted of murder.”
Owens has been fighting the death sentence but has exhausted his appeals — being re-sentenced to death three separate times.
His attorney is still waiting to receive a sworn statement about the “purity, potency, and quality” of the lethal drug from prison officials, the AP stated.
“The lack of transparency about the source of the execution drugs, how they were obtained, and whether [they] can bring about as painless a death as possible is still of grave concern to the lawyers that represent persons on death row,” lawyer John Blume told the outlet.
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