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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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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.