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.
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.