South Carolina Supreme Court to Rule On Minimum Time Between Executions

The South Carolina Supreme Court has halted further executions until it establishes a minimum interval between sending inmates to the death chamber, The Associated Press reports. The state’s next execution, scheduled for Sept. 20, is still on for inmate Freddie Eugene Owens. It would be the first execution in South Carolina in over 13 years after the court cleared the way to reopen the death chamber last month. But as it set Owens’ execution date Friday, the court also agreed to take up a request from four other death row inmates who are out of appeals to require the state to wait at least three months between executions. In its response, state prosecutors suggested setting the minimum at no longer than four weeks between executions. Currently, the Supreme Court can set executions as close together as a week apart. The accelerated schedule may rush lawyers representing multiple inmates on death row and cause botched executions, according to attorney Lindsey Vann. Neither argument is a good reason to wait for three months, state prosecutors responded by offering up to a four-week delay.

South Carolina’s last execution was in 2011. Since then, the three drugs the state used to kill inmates expired and prison officials could not obtain any more. To restart executions, lawmakers changed the lethal injection protocol to use only one drug and added the firing squad. “Executions scheduled close in time would yield a high risk of error because it has been a significant time since the last execution, one method is antiquated, and the other two are untested,” Vann said. The inmates’ motion includes interviews in news articles in which a variety of prison employees spoke about how difficult it is to perform executions or to work closely with condemned inmates. The South Carolina inmates are asking for 13 weeks between executions, citing problems Oklahoma encountered when it tried to accelerate the pace of executions there, leading to problems with carrying out death sentences. South Carolina currently has 32 inmates on its death row.