AP – South Carolina is preparing to execute the third inmate to be put to death since September as the state goes through a backlog of prisoners who exhausted their appeals while the state couldn’t find lethal injection drugs.
Marion Bowman Jr, 44, was convicted of murder in the shooting death of a friend whose burned body was found in the trunk of a car.
Bowman has maintained his innocence since his arrest. His lawyers said he was convicted on the word of several friends and relatives who received deals or had charges dropped by prosecutors in exchange for their testimony.
Bowman, who has been on death row more than half his life, was offered a plea deal for a life sentence but went to trial because he said he was not guilty. His execution will follow the state lifting a 13-year pause caused in part because state officials could not obtain lethal injection drugs. The General Assembly passed a shield law and prison officials were able to find a compounding pharmacy willing to make the pentobarbital if its identity wasn’t made public.
Bowman is not asking Governor Henry McMaster for clemency. His lawyer, Lindsey Vann, said Bowman didn’t want to spend more decades in prison for a crime he did not commit.
“After more than two decades of battling a broken system that has failed him at every turn, Marion’s decision is a powerful refusal to legitimise an unjust process that has already stolen so much of his life,” Vann said.
No governor in the previous 45 executions in South Carolina since capital punishment was reinstated in 1976 has given mercy and reduced a death sentence to life in prison without parole.
