Man says he lied when he testified against inmate who is set to be executed
Man says he lied when he testified against inmate who is set to be executed
Just days before Freddie Owens is set to die by lethal injection, the friend whose testimony helped send Owens to prison says he lied.
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.
And the state Supreme Court refused to stop Owens’ execution
When the blind justice has a hard-on for killing people...
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.
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?"
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.
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.
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.
FFS if you insist on keeping this barbaric custom, at least limit it to cases that are 100% sure.
That's kinda what it comes down to for me though. Can you EVER be 100% sure? Even if you're 99.5% sure, odds are sooner or later you'll execute someone who was innocent. And in my opinion that one single lost innocent life means the practice is unjustifiable.
I wonder how many people who disagree with me are pro life.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Don't worry everybody. It's South Carolina, so there's no chance they won't execute him. Gdi.
South Carolina
He be dead
Doesn't sound like a very good friend.