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.
In that case, you should be talking about which state did the execution, because the death penalty is state-specific. It’s not the country that did it, it’s the state. So target those people.
Also, you’re saying that the government represents its citizens because it’s a democracy. Of course that’s not true. Elected officials might represent the majority of voters, or they might pass legislation that is supported by a majority of voters on a given issue. But then what about the minority? They still exist. Please don’t forget about them. Please don’t pretend that the government is representing them.
(And sometimes that’s a good thing. There are people who have fringe views, and depending on those views I’m happy that they don’t have political power.)
I think the original statement that the US can hardly be thought of as a bastion of human rights when allowing death penalty to be used on state level is true anyway.