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.

  • superkret@feddit.org
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    6 hours ago

    FFS if you insist on keeping this barbaric custom, at least limit it to cases that are 100% sure.

    • tlou3please@lemmy.world
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      6 hours ago

      That’s kinda what it comes down to for me though. Can you EVER be 100% sure? Even if you’re 99.5% sure, odds are sooner or later you’ll execute someone who was innocent. And in my opinion that one single lost innocent life means the practice is unjustifiable.

      I wonder how many people who disagree with me are pro life.

      • Zexks@lemmy.world
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        26 minutes ago

        Yes. You absolutely can be. Ten-fifteens-twenty different angles of video evidence. 30+ eye witnesses. There’s a ones a point of insurmountable evidence to the point. It can be done.

      • FlowVoid@lemmy.world
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        6 hours ago

        I think you can. For example, I am 100% sure that Ethan Crumbley shot his classmates. (That doesn’t mean I think he should be executed though).