Convicted murderer Freddie Owens was executed in South Carolina on Friday, the first execution in the Palmetto State in 13 years, after prison authorities struggled to find the drugs needed for lethal injections.

In 1997, Owens killed a Greenville supermarket clerk during a botched robbery. During the trial, Owens killed a county jail inmate. He confessed to the crime, and the jury sentenced him to death.

In the death chamber, the 46-year-old simply said “bye” to his lawyer as he was strapped to a stretcher with his arms outstretched, according to the Associated Press.

He remained conscious for about a minute, then closed his eyes and took several deep breaths. His breaths became shorter and his face twitched for about five minutes before all movement stopped.

A little over 10 minutes later, at 6:55 p.m., a doctor came in and pronounced him dead.

Owens’ appeals have been repeatedly denied, including a last-minute attempt to keep him alive filed in federal court Friday morning. Owens also asked the U.S. Supreme Court for a stay of execution.

The governor and the director of the South Carolina Department of Corrections immediately filed a response stating that the Supreme Court should deny Owens’s motion on the grounds that his case was not unusual.

Owens was executed just days after a key witness confessed that he lied on the stand when he claimed Owens was with him in the South Carolina supermarket in 1997 when clerk Irene Graves was gunned down in a botched robbery.

Steven Golden, Owens’ former buddy, claimed he had made a secret deal with prosecutors and lied about his then-buddy’s guilt in order to avoid the death chamber himself.

“I am coming forward now because I know Freddie’s execution date is September 20th and I do not want Freddie to be executed for something he did not do,” he wrote in a court document. “This has been very distressing to me and I want to have a clear conscience.”

But it wasn’t enough to keep Owens alive.

His last chance to avoid death was when South Carolina’s Republican governor, Henry McMaster, commuted his sentence to life in prison. McMaster also denied Owens’ request, saying he had “carefully considered and thoroughly considered” Owens’ request for clemency.

Owens was the first South Carolina inmate to be executed in over a decade. Five other inmates have not been appealed, and the South Carolina Supreme Court has opened the possibility of one execution every five weeks.

When there was an unintentional interruption of executions due to a lack of drugs for lethal injection, the state attempted to kill prisoners sentenced to death by firing squad.

In order to resume executions, however, the state had to pass a secrecy law in May that kept the drug suppliers and large parts of the execution protocol secret.

State officials said the new lethal injection method follows the procedure the federal government uses to kill inmates.

Under South Carolina law, he had to decide how he wanted to die. He could have chosen to die by firing squad or in the electric chair, which was built in 1912.

Owens was convicted of the 1999 murder of Irene Graves. Prosecutors said he shot the single mother of three in the head when she was unable to open the store’s safe.

After his conviction, but before he received sentence for Graves’ killing, Owens carried out a fatal attack on a fellow prison inmate, Christopher Lee.

Owens confessed in detail how he stabbed Lee, burned his eyes, choked him and kicked him.

He told authorities he did it “because I had been wrongly convicted of murder,” according to an investigator’s written report.

This detailed confession was read to every jury and judge who subsequently sentenced Owens to death. Two death sentences were overturned on appeal, but he ended up back on death row.

Owens was charged with Lee’s murder but never brought to trial. Prosecutors dropped the charges, with the right to refile them in 2019, around the time Owens ran out of regular appeal options.

In his final appeal, Owens’ lawyers argued that prosecutors never presented scientific evidence that Owens pulled the trigger on Graves. The main evidence, they said, was based on Golden’s testimony.

“South Carolina is on the brink of executing a man for a crime he did not commit. We will continue to advocate for Mr. Owens,” attorney Gerald “Bo” King said in a statement.

Owens’ lawyers also said he was only 19 years old at the time of the murder and suffered brain damage from physical and sexual abuse in juvenile detention.

With post wires