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.
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.
I understand you’re speaking casually, but in fact many of us do not say that. It’s always a risky proposition when you conflate an organization with individuals in it.
Yeah but it’s many who do agree with it. In this case there’s enough elected officials who’s constituents want the death penalty to be a thing. Ours isn’t a perfect democracy but to argue our government isn’t a representation of its citizens is just a lie
In that case, you should be talking about which state did the execution, because the death penalty is state-specific. It’s not the country that did it, it’s the state. So target those people.
Also, you’re saying that the government represents its citizens because it’s a democracy. Of course that’s not true. Elected officials might represent the majority of voters, or they might pass legislation that is supported by a majority of voters on a given issue. But then what about the minority? They still exist. Please don’t forget about them. Please don’t pretend that the government is representing them.
(And sometimes that’s a good thing. There are people who have fringe views, and depending on those views I’m happy that they don’t have political power.)
I think the original statement that the US can hardly be thought of as a bastion of human rights when allowing death penalty to be used on state level is true anyway.
We have to do something about people who can’t be in society.
Many people can be rehabilitated but some cannot. For them, our options are killing them or imprisoning them permanently.
I’m not sure, of those two options, which is a greater violation of rights.
I do think that permanent imprisonment immediately becomes less of a rights violation if the prisoner is given the option to commit suicide in a painless way.
But if they’re forcibly kept alive, or forced to do something horrific like banging their head into concrete to escape their life, I think it’s very possible that’s a greater injustice than simply ending them.
Well, you could work with them like in Scandinavian countries. Prison doesn’t have to be torture, right? People don’t have to suffer there and do horrific things to kill themselves to escape the suffering.
Killing somebody because they killed somebody just seems hypocritical. Regardless of the ethics.
From a strict utilitarian “this person is an active threat to the lives of others and cannot be rehabilitated” perspective, I get it. We kill wild animals for a lot less. Given perfect knowledge I don’t have a hard line against execution.
But that’s a hell of a hypothetical. Lots of violence is circumstantial and not necessarily and indication of future behavior, especially if we actually gave a shit about mental health and improving the living conditions of struggling people. Far too many convictions are improper or outright incorrect. Society should have a responsibility to care for the worst of itself. It all stacks up to “do we trust ourselves, and our government, with something so extreme and irreversible?”
Well it always costs more, in the US Justice system, to execute someone than to keep them in prison for life. So that alone throws out the utilitarian approach. We’re all paying extra just to kill him now than if we just kept him locked up for life because he might be a direct threat to everyone and not be rehabilitated.
It’s not that cut-and-dry. Yes the monetary cost is higher, mostly due to appeals and such and I’m not suggesting we do things to make the conviction and sentence less certain. But there’s an argument to be made that a lifetime of solitary imprisonment, necessary for this hypothetical criminal, is more cruel than death.
I’m not sure there are people so unrecoverable that they need a lifetime in solitary. I’m fact I’m not sure how you pass the cruel and unusual criteria with that. Even in super max prisons for people who WANT to go out and kill strangers for example, they are able to regularly socialize and exercise and have mental stimulation. So no I don’t think there are a lot of people where spending extra money to kill them would be “more humane”. Seems more like a straw man/hypothetical than a practical reality.
I did literally use the word “hypothetical” to couch my statement. It should probably be reserved for people whose existence is dangerous to society as part of a larger movement, cult leaders or treasonous generals or some such that have a substantial influence beyond their confinement. I know: martyrdom, you can’t kill an idea, etc. Not sure I buy it.
There are ways to silence those people without killing them though. Theoretically that is the reason that GITMO exists.
Perhaps it should be a lifetime of imprisonment, with access to a painless suicide option.
That’s a very coercive relationship, I don’t think there’s an ethical way to implement “optional” suicide when the only alternative is the other party having total control over your life.
Yes it is a very coercive relationship. It should only be used on people who have proven incapable of having non-coercive relationships with others.
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But we can stop people from killing. We can get into questions of mercy killing when we start talking about supermax for life. But at the end of the day once someone’s in custody and known to be extremely violent they’re able to be stopped from killing people.
If that is your only benchmark for morality, sure.
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.
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.
well we also made a ton of dubious self defense loopholes, so the state doesn’t have a monopoly
not to diminish your point - but separately - also disproportionately innocent people
I agree. You kill someone, your life should also be over. There is no rehabilitation, you don’t get a second chance. There is no “making it right”, you ended the life of another person and no you go bye-bye as well.
But there needs to be certainty, and the way it is handed out now (especially in red states) is atrocious.
I keep reading these comments of people talking about how the murderer can be rehabilitated and then society is better. No, it’s not. And if someone killed their loved one they would be singing a completely different tune.
You keep saying kill and not murder. In our legal system there’s some pretty significant differences.
Knowing about how deeply police intimidate, manipulate, and gaslight inmates/people in custody to get these confessions, both confessions should be under deep scrutiny.
“Criminals” intimated into confession is literally just the police refusing to do their actual jobs and using emotional and mental manipulation to “crack the case.” They didn’t find the killer, they just bullied a plausible suspect into “admitting” they did it.
Fucking sickening.
Confessions in police custody without being verified as voluntarily provided by defense counsel should not be admissible in court as a confession.
The death penalty should be abolished.
Appeals should have the same reasonable doubt standard as a trail. If new information introduces reasonable doubt is juat as important as whether they followed procedures during the trial. The whole idea that ‘it should have been introduced at trial’ is commonly used to dismiss appeals based on evidence that was excluded or not available at the time, especially for defendents that can’t afford high priced lawyers.
The whole idea that ‘it should have been introduced at trial’
It’s almost as if the entire “justice system” is designed to protect a certain class of person while fucking over everyone else. Cue the people so shocked that this “justice system” can easily be abused by people acting in bad faith to enable fascism. People have been brainwashed into believing that the USA isn’t just Diet Fascism. Fascism with a pretty face, fascism with “free speech” so the plebes have a steam valve to release their frustration while also being told that protesting is too disruptive so they need to stick to “free speech zones” miles away from what they’re protesting. Wild that it’s so hard to put together when the original Constitution only allowed land-owning white men to vote.
Yes we really need to change the standard for confessions. The other day a guy with a truck tried to run me over walking my dog, I called the police with his license plate, and because there were no cameras the cops won’t investigate. This man deliberately tried to hit me, a random stranger, with his car like a psychopath and the cops said there’s nothing they can do, no evidence. I said, “I’m the evidence. Eye witness testimony.” They said it’s not enough.
So if the cops feel like “someone saying something,” isn’t good enough, then why are they accepting confessions?
And it’s kinda funny the police now innately care about video footage since we force them to wear bodycams. How intrinsic to their mindset is the whole “no video, no evidence, can’t be charged,” mindset? Back in the 90s and before, going to trial over eye witness testimony was common. Majority of court cases don’t/didn’t have video footage.
You will NEVER get the south to give up capital punishment.
The Bible belt will never accept that God is to be the ultimate judge, just like they will never accept the equality of the races.
Could we get them to stop knowingly executing the innocent at least
No, because that’s the point.
They’re not weak like us, they aren’t troubled by such petty details like due process and justice. This is about order more than law.
Live there for a while, you learn the sheriff is the local feudal lord, and you better bow and scrape if you want to get by.
What is the benefit of this comment?
What is the benefit of your comment?
Opening the possibility that “x will never be accomplished” is probably useless demotivatiomal talk, while giving the commenter the benefit of the doubt in that there might be some purpose I haven’t thought of.
You still have not explained the benefit of your comment.
The south is continuing to execute people, mostly on racist bases, and they won’t stop.
You can’t shame someone who has no shame, and the rest of the world acting in shock of their behavior has no impact on them.
They’re like Trump-followers, the trolling and shock value is the point, they get off on it.
The last time the South decided to continue a practice the rest of the country abhorred, they fought a brutal, treasonous war resulting in the death of a million Americans. Words aren’t going to lead to change, they never have before.
People need to understand we either force the South to enter to modern era, or they never will on their own.
So you’re encouraging the recognition that it’s fruitless to get worked up over it? “Don’t feed the trolls” essentially?
No, I think we need to stop whinging and actually do something about it.
We need to resume reconstruction, put laws like the VRA and others back into place, we need to force them to live in the modern world under the constitution.
Just like we sent the FBI down, but we waited till they tortured and murdered 3 white northern kids, we should be brutally aggressive and take all of their bigotry and corruption apart.
We need to pass a law or amendment that allows us to challenge any southern conviction on the basis of evidence and/or clear bias, not just process and/or constitutionality.
We need to stop indulging the south when they do all this vile, evil shit, Hitler literally wrote about Southern Jim Crow in Mein Kampf as a model\ that Germany needed to look to, and our black GIs came back from fighting Nazis in Europe to be lynched. We owe them better.
And now he’s dead.
What the hell is wrong with those people?!? If there’s any doubt, then pause the execution.
Honestly, I don’t know. I wish I knew. I want to understand my opponents even if just to understand how best to fight them, but this just seems so blatantly evil I can’t understand it.
This attitude is what scares me even more than the Christian nationalist terrorism and bigotry. Because this blase approach to formal state sanctioned execution is how very evil people start moving the country towards a comfort with “if the government executed them then they deserved it”. We must remember that Holocaust began with criminals. I just don’t trust the government to kill anyone, and this right here is part of why.
As one of his last actions before leaving office, Donald Trump fast-tracked 13 federal executions. It’s like he wanted to kill as many people as he possibly could.
They’re Christian Nationalists who believe the bible must be taken literally!
Therefore they are strictly pro-life (before birth), they believe he who has sin must cast the first stone, and those moneylenders must be worshipped as the job-creators they are!
They’re Christian Nationalists who believe the bible must be taken literally!
Literalism is always a fraud because every written work of length contradicts itself and/or leaves room for interpretation. Language is imprecise and a lot of these works were also translated which allows even more opportunity for interpretation.
I mean, also it was a time when we didn’t have any science at all, so believing magical spirits and all powerful invisible sky-men control the world are get angry when you masturbate is just as reasonable as the germ theory of disease and the laws of thermodynamics.
But it’s like having an imaginary friend: Fine when you’re a child, but after a while, you might just have psychiatric issues.
That’s not very Christian of them.
They used this to defend slavery: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_Ham and still use it to defend racism.
I think you’ll be surprised what you can twist logic into if you really want to.
“Pro-life” (i.e. forced birth) beliefs don’t even come from the Bible.
And 73 virgins didn’t come from the Qur’an, it came from some Imam who wanted political power so he sold his followers as soldiers to as rising potential Caliph.
Ignorant people rewrite their religion to match their personal views, in fact the bible was completely rewritten by Constantine to support the Roman empire and convince Christians that it was truly Christian to fight and die for him.
In a just society that would be a commutation at the very least. You don’t use the death penalty if any doubt exists. Nobody is saying to set the man free. That can be adjudicated later, if at all.
I respect workers, and the vast majority of workers administering the death penalty become opposed to the death penalty.
https://www.npr.org/2022/11/16/1136796857/death-penalty-executions-prison
Workers deserve protections, always. No worker should have to do this or witness this. The death penalty is cruel and unjust.
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 (emphasis added)
WTF?
ACAB
In this case it is a court issue, not a policing issue. The prosecutor is a bastard.
APAB
Edit: I’m not saying cops aren’t bastards…
Courts are part of the same system. ACAB top to bottom.
Don’t worry everybody. It’s South Carolina, so there’s no chance they won’t execute him. Gdi.
The only people who should suffer the death penalty are those who advocate for it.
The actual capital punishment for human beings should be a lifelong attempt to teach them empathy and make them truly regret what they did. There are two extremes: people with a lot of empathy, and psychopaths. Every living being is on a spectrum between the two. If the spectrum is swinging too far to being a psychopath, keep them locked up forever - not as a punishment, but to protect society. If they are capable of learning empathy, make them truly regret their deeds and that will be punishment enough.
People who advocate for the death penalty are typically very far removed from empathetic human beings, toward the psychopath end of the scale.
Locked up forever sounds a lot like the death penalty.
You can be released from prison. You can’t be un-executed.
I think it sounds worse.
Doesn’t sound like a very good friend.
South Carolina
He be dead