COLUMBIA, SC — South Carolina executed inmate Freddie Owens on Friday, resuming executions after an inadvertent 13-year hiatus because prison officials were unable to obtain the drugs needed for lethal injections.

Owens was convicted in 1997 of killing a Greenville store clerk during a robbery. During the trial, Owens killed a county jail inmate. His confession to the attack was read to two different juries and a judge, all of whom sentenced him to death.

Owens, 46, did not give a final statement. His last meal consisted of two cheeseburgers, French fries, a well-done ribeye steak, six chicken wings, two strawberry lemonades and a slice of apple pie.

When the curtain opened to the death chamber, Owens was strapped to a gurney, his arms outstretched. After he was administered the drug, he said goodbye to his lawyer and she said goodbye to him.

He smiled slightly and his expression barely changed before he seemed to lose consciousness after about a minute. He then closed his eyes and took several deep breaths. His breathing became shallower and his face continued to twitch for four or five minutes before the movements stopped.

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

Owens’ latest appeal has been denied multiple times, including by a federal court on 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 saying the Supreme Court should deny Owens’s request. The opinion said his case was not unusual.

The Supreme Court rejected the request shortly after the execution was scheduled to begin.

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.

First execution in 13 years

Owens may be the first of several people to die in the state’s death chamber, the Broad River Correctional Institution. Appeals are already underway for five others, and the South Carolina Supreme Court has cleared the possibility of holding an execution every five weeks.

South Carolina first attempted to use the firing squad to resume executions after supplies of lethal injection drugs ran out and no company was willing to sell them publicly. However, in order to reopen the death chamber, the state had to pass a secrecy law that kept the drug supplier and much of the execution protocol secret.

To carry out executions, the state switched from a three-drug method to a new protocol that uses only the sedative pentobarbital. The new procedure is similar to how the federal government kills people on death row, prison officials said.

Under South Carolina law, those convicted have the choice between lethal injection, the new firing squad, or the electric chair, invented in 1912. Owens let his lawyer decide how he would die. He said he felt that if he made that decision, he would be complicit in his own death, and his religious beliefs condemn suicide.

While in prison, Owens changed his name to “Khalil Divine Black Sun Allah,” but he is still referred to as Owens in court and prison records.

The crimes

Owens was convicted of the 1999 murder of Irene Graves. Prosecutors said he shot the single mother of three, who worked three jobs, in the head when she said she couldn’t open the store’s safe.

Another murder loomed over his case: After his conviction, but before passing sentence for Graves’ killing, Owens carried out a fatal attack on Christopher Lee, with whom he was incarcerated in a county jail.

Owens gave a detailed confession about stabbing Lee, burning his eyes, choking him and stomping on him. According to an investigator’s written report, he ended by saying he did it “because I had been wrongfully convicted of murder.”

The confession was read to each jury and judge who subsequently sentenced Owens to death. Two of Owens’ death sentences were overturned on appeal, and he was returned to 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.

Final remedies

In his final appeal, Owens’ lawyers argued that prosecutors never presented scientific evidence that Owens pulled the trigger in Graves’s killing. The main evidence against him was a co-defendant who pleaded guilty and testified that Owens was the killer.

Owens’ lawyers presented an affidavit from Steven Golden two days before the execution in which he said Owens was not at the store, contradicting his testimony at trial. Prosecutors said other friends of Owens and his ex-girlfriend testified that he had bragged about killing the clerk.

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

“Mr. Owens’ childhood was marked by suffering on a scale that is hard to comprehend. He spent his adult life in prison for a crime he did not commit,” attorney Gerald “Bo” King said in a statement after Owens’ execution. “The legal errors, hidden collusion and false evidence that made this evening possible should shame us all.”

About 90 minutes before Owens’ death, South Carolinians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty held a vigil outside the prison.

South Carolina reinstates the death penalty

The last execution in South Carolina took place in May 2011. It took a decade of execution controversy in the legislature—first allowing execution by firing squad as a death penalty and later passing a death penalty protection law—before the death penalty was reinstated.

South Carolina has carried out 43 executions since the death penalty was reinstated in the United States in 1976. In the early 2000s, the state averaged three executions per year. Only nine states have recorded more executions.

Since the inadvertent suspension of executions, the number of people sentenced to death in South Carolina has decreased. At the beginning of 2011, 63 people were sentenced to death. After Owens’ death on Friday, the number is now 31. About 20 people have been released from death row and sentenced to other prison terms after successful appeals. Others died of natural causes.