Last meal of death row inmate revealed after South Carolina’s first execution in 13 years

South Carolina has executed its first dying row inmate in 13 years for the homicide of a comfort retailer clerk in 1997.

Khalil Divine Black Solar Allah, 46, died by deadly injection on Friday night after the US Supreme Court docket refused to cease the execution and the state’s governor Henry McMaster denied clemency.

Allah, who was beforehand referred to as Freddie Owens, was executed in entrance of three media witnesses on the Broad River Correctional Establishment in Columbia.

The 46-year-old started receiving deadly injection medicine round 6:35pm and was pronounced lifeless 20 minutes later. The execution was delayed from its unique 6pm begin time because the state awaited the Supreme Court docket’s resolution.

Allah’s final meal consisted of two cheeseburgers, fries, a well-done ribeye steak, six hen wings, two strawberry sodas, and a slice of apple pie, WYFF studies.

“No signal of any discomfort,” media witness Jeffery Collins of the Related Press wrote. “Freddie Owens the entire manner by means of, had perhaps, like a small smile or definitely not a grimace or something like that in the course of the time that he appeared to nonetheless have consciousness when this was happening.”

Allah was convicted of armed theft and the homicide of cashier Irene Graves on the comfort retailer in 1997. He was 19 on the time of the slaying by which Graves, 41, was shot within the head.

Graves’s son and son-in-law had been current for the execution, as had been relations of Christopher Bryan Lee, a former cellmate whom Allah killed in 1999.

Allah has all the time insisted he was harmless of the homicide of Graves.

Weeks earlier than the execution, co-defendant Steven Golden advised courts that he testified towards Allah beneath a secret deal he had with prosecutors. Simply two days earlier than the execution Golden walked again his testimony.

Golden, who served 28 years in jail for his function within the slaying, wrote in a sworn assertion that he lied to a South Carolina jury within the 1999 trial when he mentioned Owens had pulled the set off. He added that he was excessive on cocaine and marijuana when he was initially arrested and questioned by police.

“Freddie Owens shouldn’t be the one that shot Irene Graves on the Speedway on November 1, 1997,” Golden wrote within the sworn assertion filed to the South Carolina Supreme Court docket this week, reported The Greenville Information. “Freddie was not current once I robbed the Speedway that day.”

“Freddie Owens didn’t kill Ms. Graves,” the Workplace of the Federal Public Defender for the Western District of North Carolina mentioned in an announcement to Fox Carolina. “His dying tonight is a tragedy. Mr. Owens’s childhood was marked by struggling on a scale that’s exhausting to understand. He spent his maturity in jail for a criminal offense that he didn’t commit. The authorized errors, hidden offers, and false proof that made tonight potential ought to disgrace us all.”

South Carolina stopped executing inmates when it ran out of the medicine wanted to hold out deadly injections in 2011. Within the years after that, the state launched the usage of the electrical chair and dying by firing squad earlier than passing a “defend regulation” to cover all details about acquiring the medicine and procedures used within the deadly injection.

The Unbiased and the nonprofit Accountable Enterprise Initiative for Justice (RBIJ) have launched a joint marketing campaign calling for an finish to the dying penalty within the US. The RBIJ has attracted greater than 150 well-known signatories to their Enterprise Leaders Declaration In opposition to the Demise Penalty – with The Unbiased as the most recent on the listing. We be a part of high-profile executives like Ariana Huffington, Fb’s Sheryl Sandberg, and Virgin Group founder Sir Richard Branson as a part of this initiative and are making a pledge to focus on the injustices of the dying penalty in our protection.