Just days before inmate Freddie Owens is set to die by lethal injection in South Carolina, the friend whose testimony helped send Owens to prison is saying he lied to save himself from the death chamber.

Owens is set to die at 6 p.m. Friday at a Columbia prison for the killing of a Greenville convenience store clerk in 1997.

But Owens’ lawyers on Wednesday filed a sworn statement from his co-defendant Steven Golden late Wednesday to try to stop South Carolina from carrying out its first execution in more than a decade.

Prosecutors reiterated that several other witnesses testified that Owens told them he pulled the trigger. And the state Supreme Court refused to stop Owens’ execution last week after Golden, in a sworn statement, said that he had a secret deal with prosecutors that he never told the jury about.

  • Maeve@kbin.earth
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    14 hours ago

    That the United States holds ourselves a bastion of democracy and human rights is absolutely absurd. The death penalty shouldn’t exist; This is quite possibly murder.

    • CosmicTurtle0@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      13 hours ago

      I don’t have a problem with the death penalty as a concept.

      I have a problem with the fact that it disproportionately is given to people of color where evidence is dubious and circumstantial.

      Treason and sedition should still be capital crimes.

      • drdalek@lemmy.world
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        12 hours ago

        I do, when you start putting the right to kill for crimes, in the hands of the state, you’ve lost the plot in democracy.

        • Fedizen@lemmy.world
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          11 hours ago

          well we also made a ton of dubious self defense loopholes, so the state doesn’t have a monopoly