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.
FFS if you insist on keeping this barbaric custom, at least limit it to cases that are 100% sure.
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.
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).
With respect, it kind of misses the point to highlight a case where guilt is basically certain. That’s not my concern. My concern is the fringe cases with more ambiguity. I think that if there’s even a 1% chance that an innocent person is executed, the risk isn’t worth it.
I don’t believe pointing out a case where certainty is ensured missed the point; rather, it argues the point. He’s giving an example where execution would be okay due to their being absolute certainty, not arguing that it should be the same outcome where there isn’t absolute certainty.
But this is a case of all or nothing. You either say the death penalty IS acceptable or it ISN’T. There is no in between. So highlighting a case with certainty doesn’t address the issue of cases with less certainty.
That is a false dichotomy. If you accept the idea of the existence of cases with certainty there is the possibility of the restriction of the use of the death penalty to those cases.