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.

  • snooggums@lemmy.world
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    9 days ago

    Guess innocence isn’t as important as the death penalty. They should have known that someone lied under oath at the time, right?

    Or maybe they could not execute him and take the time to find out if the new information is true or not.

    • atzanteol@sh.itjust.works
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      9 days ago

      Guess innocence isn’t as important as the death penalty. They should have known that someone lied under oath at the time, right?

      Don’t be obtuse. Multiple lines of evidence were presented to convince 12 people that he was guilty.

      Guess we should just release everybody from prison because we can never know with 100% certainty that anyone ever did anything.

      • catloaf@lemm.ee
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        9 days ago

        There are a lot of options between release and execution. Maybe we should consider those.

      • pupupipi@lemmy.world
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        9 days ago

        but the cheap labor?? the us wouldn’t survive without the prison system, don’t know why they’re wasting good drugs on the guy though, why waste a life unless we get to make some burgers out of him or something, right? god bless