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We live in a culture of entitlement. Of accommodation. Of rationalization. Of excuses. In the state of South Carolina – where violent crime has skyrocketed in recent years – our so-called “justice” system has habitually turned a blind eye to the victims of violent crimes.
Our state’s approach to “accountability” for these hardened criminals has been to repeatedly turn them back on the streets – whether via paltry bonds or anemic sentences – thus compromising public safety and eroding the integrity of our court system.
This corruption has been institutionally enabled – most significantly by the powerful politicians who pick our judges.
Our media outlet has been leading the fight to address this corruption in the hopes of improving outcomes for victims and the public at large. Specifically, we have led the fight to fix the way judges are selected in the Palmetto State – and while some progress has been made on that front, much more progress is necessary.
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Last month, progress was made on another critical front my outlet has been addressing for years: Capital punishment. As I reported at the time, the S.C. supreme court overturned a lower court ruling which had barred the S.C. Department of Corrections (SCDC) from carrying out executions.
“South Carolina … has a long-established public policy of punishment that includes using the death penalty for the most heinous of crimes,” justice John Few noted in his majority opinion. “Because the death penalty is constitutional, there is necessarily a constitutional method of carrying it out.”
Actually, three constitutional methods now exist in South Carolina: Lethal injection, electrocution and firing squad. And earlier this week, SCDC director Bryan Stirling has affirmed that all three methods are ready to be carried out at the direction of the court.
Three weeks after its historic ruling effectively reinstating capital punishment, the court issued an execution order for convicted killer Freddie Eugene Owens for Friday, September 20, 2024.
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Owens must decide no later than Friday September 6, 2024 – a week from today – whether he wishes to die by injection, electrocution or firing squad. If he makes no decision, he will be electrocuted.
How did Owens wind up on death row? In the early morning hours of November 1, 1997, Owens shot and killed 41-year-old Irene Graves of Greenville, S.C. in the head during an armed robbery at a Speedway convenience store. A single parent, Graves had two young children at the time she was murdered – an eight-year-old and a ten-year-old – in addition to a son in college.
Owens murdered Graves because she couldn’t open the safe at the convenience store.
While awaiting his sentencing, Owens committed another horrific murder – brutally beating his 28-year-old cellmate, Christopher B. Lee, and stabbing him repeatedly in the face multiple times with a pen.
“He never fought back after the first punch,” Owens told investigators.
The account of Lee’s killing is unspeakably savage, with Owens describing to investigators how he stabbed Lee in the eye with the pen, strangled him, stomped on his head and chest while he was defenseless, used a cigarette lighter to burn his eyes and attempted to use the pen to stab him in the chest and throat.
“I got back over him and rammed the pen up his right nostril,” Owens admitted. “I kept on checking him to see if he was dead.”
This individual, believe it or not, is the person the South Carolina chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) – which has been busy of late crusading for transgender porn in government-run schools – has begged governor Henry McMaster to spare.
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“We are joining faith leaders, civil rights leaders, and people of good conscience around our state calling on governor McMaster to stop this execution and all others,” ACLU leader Jace Woodrum told The (U.K.) Guardian.
McMaster, thankfully, is having none of it.
Meanwhile, left-leaning media outlet Slate criticized South Carolina’s plans to move swiftly with its upcoming executions, arguing “there is no place for execution on an assembly line.”
Actually, there is a place for such an assembly line – something I’ve made abundantly clear in challenging our state’s politicians on this issue over the past decade.
South Carolina has not executed an inmate since May 6, 2011, when 36-year-old Jeffrey Brian Motts was put to death by lethal injection. No executions have taken place since Motts was put to death, however, and prosecutors have typically refrained from seeking the death penalty in high profile cases because of its lack of availability.
That is no longer a problem…
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RELATED | SUPREME COURT UPHOLDS THREE DEATH PENALTY METHODS
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I have consistently argued on behalf of capital punishment being “broadly implemented” in response to especially heinous cases – like the brutal kidnapping and murder of 21-year-old University of South Carolina student Samantha Lee Josephson in March of 2019.
That verdict was recently upheld by the S.C. court of appeals, incidentally.
“There’s no point having a debate over the efficacy of capital punishment if it is only going to be carried out once a year using the most genteel of methods,” I wrote seven years ago in an expansive piece on criminal justice reform. “There’s simply nothing to debate under these circumstances except that killing someone in America (has become) a ticket to stardom and ‘three hots and a cot’ for life courtesy of the taxpayers.”
In a follow-up column, I pointed out the establishment of such a societal construct “is not a deterrent (but) an incentive” to violent crime – one creating lasting societal problems that reach well beyond “the fates befalling victims.”
South Carolina’s crime reports have borne out this grim reality…
The alternative? Making the death penalty a true deterrent to taking the life of a fellow human being. Which, for lack of a better description, means lining them up… and putting them down.
Enough entitlement. Enough accommodation. Enough rationalizing. Enough excuses.
Line them up, and put them down. Let’s start sending the message to violent criminals in the Palmetto State that if they take another human being’s life in a manner which meets one of the aggravating circumstances specifically enumerated in the S.C. Code of Laws (§ 16-3-20), they will face death. And will be put to death.
More importantly, let’s start sending the message to victims of violent crime – and those whose lives are irrevocably shattered by those acts of barbarism – that the system of justice which is supposed to be working for them is, at long last, finally doing its job.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR …
Will Folks is the owner and founding editor of FITSNews. Prior to founding his own news outlet, he served as press secretary to the governor of South Carolina, bass guitarist in an alternative rock band and bouncer at a Columbia, S.C. dive bar. He lives in the Midlands region of the state with his wife and eight children.
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9 comments
The “pro-life” author can barely contain his bloodlust for the administrative state to kill people who he thinks deserve it.
No commie, he means a person that a JURY OF CITIZENS, after a full hearing on the evidence deemed to deserve it, and only after many years of appeals and motion practice. And the vast majority of people know the difference between innocent, helpless life of the unborn and the lives of those adults who knowingly commit the most heinous of crimes, of whom only a fraction get the death sentence.
Ah yes, “commies” are notoriously anti-death penalty
You don’t think the jury or the legal system ever gets it wrong? The same legal system you all are all bitching about constantly on here? But now you are okay with them imposing death? Just in case you do actually decide to be inconsistent about government fallibility, maybe look into how many people get exonerated after the exact same process you just described.
You have decided you get to determine when life is valuable and when it is not? The arrogance you must have. I would love to be a fly on the wall when people like you are explaining to the Creator how you took it upon yourself to determine the value of life.
Also, since it is a pet peeve of mine when people use terms they do not understand, go do some research on “commies” – I suspect if you are honest with yourself and actually do the research you will find the characteristics of a communist government are far more similar to the people this website and its acolytes kneel down to day after day…
They’re mad I got found guilty for stuff everyone knows I did, and I haven’t even been sentenced yet!
He’s had 20+ years to convince several courts that he is wrongly accused. When the evidence is overwhelmingly, that makes it much harder to do.
You still have a few hours to convince Freddie to accept Jesus as his savior. His Muslim faith will not save him.
“People who think he deserves it”… have you read what he did? Or any of the other five who have run out of appeals? The world will be a better place the day each of them stop consuming oxygen.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with the long and deep ties that the ACLU has with the communist and socialist movements in America – or just don’t care, at least consider the deafening silence of the ACLU during the pandemic when people were being forced to take an experimental vaccine or lose their jobs, or the forced masking of children in schools, or losing their freedom to assemble and worship, or having their livelihoods destroyed. They didn’t lift a finger. But God forbid the DMV makes someone wearing a hijab remove it for a driver’s license photo, or a black inmate be forced to shave off his filthy dreadlocks because of the prison system’s policies to contain lice, or a town decline a permit for a KKK rally’s right to march with hoods and torches through a poor black neighborhood, THEN the ACLU is a blazing beacon zeal to defend their rights.