On September 20, 2024, the state of South Carolina executed its first prisoner in thirteen years. At the sprawling Broad River Road Correctional Institute situated just outside of downtown Columbia, Freddie Owens was administered the lethal injection option that ended his life after waiting on Death Row since 1999. His final meal was two cheeseburgers, French fries, a ribeye steak, and six chicken wings. For dessert, Owens consumed two strawberry sodas and a slice of apple pie. His final words were a simple "goodbye" to his lawyer.
The case of Freddie Owens is complicated. Just two days before the execution was carried out, the man who was accused of taking part in the crime with Owens radically changed his story. Steven Golden, Owens's accomplice whose testimony served as a foundational piece of evidence against Owens in his conviction, threw a wrench in South Carolina's pursuit of completing the sentence. In a sworn statement, Golden claimed that he lied about Owens's role in the crime to save himself from the death chamber. Additionally, Golden claimed in another sworn statement that Owens wasn't present at the crime scene when the victim, Irene Graves, was killed during the robbery in Greenville. Explaining his choice to finally admit to these fabrications, Golden said "I'm coming forward now because I know Freddie's execution date is September 20th and I don't want Freddie to be executed for something that he didn't do."
In the end, South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster denied Owens's request for clemency. The State executed Mr. Owens as relatives of the victim watched through the thick glass window. As the forty-six-year-old's life ended, a large question mark surrounded the evidence presented by the prosecution. During the trial, prosecutors failed to tell the jury that Golden entered a plea deal in exchange for his testimony. Other testimony included Owens's girlfriend and friends saying that Owens had bragged about committing the crime. While the murder weapon was never found, the footage from the store camera showed the shooter wearing a ski mask. A ski mask tied to Owens served as the final death knell in the prosecution's pursuit of execution.
The story of Freddie Owens, like many other young men in America, is one of brokenness, violence, and a death that leads to hard questions. His early life reveals the effects of a broken home and poverty. Born to an eighteen-year-old mother in South Carolina, Owens's early life was marked by time in foster care and violence in his home. By the time he entered his teen years, he had spent time in a juvenile prison where he claimed to have suffered both physical and sexual violence. The crime for which he was executed happened in 1997 when he was nineteen years old. That day, Owens was accused of attempting to rob a convenience store where Irene Graves worked as a clerk. Graves was a single mother of three who, when the assailants demanded she open the store safe, told them she was unable to do so. Shortly after this, a bullet to her head ended her life.
Further complicating the story, while held in a local jail awaiting trial, Owens was involved in an altercation with another inmate that ended in that inmate's death. Owens claimed that the altercation was a result of his anger at being falsely accused. In 1999, Owens was sentenced to death.
Four days before Owens was administered a lethal cocktail of drugs, my wife and I sat twelve miles down the road at the University of South Carolina Law School in downtown Columbia. The evening was sponsored by the South Carolina Study Center, a new ministry on campus that serves a largely secular student body with Christian speakers, a library, and reading groups. The guest that night was a Washington, DC lawyer named Matt Martens, an attorney who served for many years as a prosecutor.
Martens was promoting a new book, Reforming Criminal Justice: A Christian Proposal. The night was a clear indictment of our current system filled with theology, legal theory, and history. Martens's main target in his talk was the plea bargain system at the heart of our justice system. He argued that this system leads to an environment where justice is routinely neglected in the face of pragmatism. Martens even cited a statistic from one large city where public defenders averaged roughly six minutes with their clients before trial. The picture Martens painted was one where the wealthy have access to top attorneys with time to prepare for trial, while the poor classes, who populate most of the criminal justice system, are left with public defenders who are overworked and under-resourced, and thus given far less time to prepare a defense.
Our nation has been engaged in a decades-long conversation about what justice in America looks like. The pro-life movement has been a collection of prominent voices, though admittedly, the movement is currently a constellation of competing interests. While committed advocates seek to protect the lives of children in the womb, more nefarious actors are included in the coalition. These actors include politicians who use abortion as a convenient culture war issue and conservatives who pay lip service to the pro-life cause with little real connection to the underlying issues. And since Dobbs, the movement has only become more complicated. The Trump-Vance ticket disappointed many social conservatives when they claimed they would not support a national abortion ban. With political capital that appears to be slipping away and a nation that is largely unsympathetic to the pro-life cause, the time has come for the movement to be transformed.
Drawing on my own experience as an evangelical who is enthusiastic about limiting the number of abortions, the case can be made that many conservative Catholics and evangelicals are single-issue voters. In a compelling defense of single-issue voting, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary professor Stephen Wellum argued that a political candidate should only be endorsed if he or she is pro-life. Wellum goes on in the article to present the pro-life viewpoint solely as opposition to abortion. Wellum's defense is that "justice" cannot be pursued without an understanding of the dignity of all people. This raises the question: does that dignity extend to those executed by a state that has failed to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt?
The current injustices in our legal system serve as a grave affront to the protection of life in American society. While the abortion industry routinely relies on utilitarian arguments of convenience to end the lives of infants, our justice system relies on a faulty system of plea bargains and eyewitness testimony to sentence men and women to death. The overwhelming lack of concern for the flaws in our justice system is not only inconsistent, but a missed opportunity to protect life.
It's unclear why the pro-life movement has failed to champion the dignity of human life across all contexts, including the death penalty. Granted, it's much easier, much "neater," to sympathize with an innocent unborn child than a Death Row inmate. But if the pro-life movement wants to continue its righteous cause and be comprehensively pro-life, ease and neatness cannot be barriers to justice.
A comprehensively pro-life ethic demands opposing the death penalty. While serious people can debate the underlying ethics of whether the death penalty is just, our country has proven that it is unable to carry out executions in a way that protects justice. Since 1973, more than 200 people have been wrongly sentenced to death in the United States. A 2014 study by the Innocence Project found that roughly 4 percent of people sentenced to death are wrongly convicted. For many, like Freddie Owens, the truth about guilt or innocence may never be known.
Less than a week after Freddie Owens was executed under dubious circumstances, the State of Missouri executed a man named Marcellus Williams. Fifty-five-year-old Williams was sentenced to death for the 1998 murder of Felicia Gayle, a local newspaper reporter. That night, a group of attorneys with the Innocence Project, who had been working for his exoneration, posted a chilling statement: "Tonight, Missouri executed an innocent man."
Williams's DNA had never been found on the murder weapon and the weapon was mishandled by a trial prosecutor who contaminated the knife used to commit the crime. The chief evidence against Williams, in a situation similar to Owens's story, was another inmate's account and Williams's girlfriend's testimony. The defense argued that both were motivated by a $10,000 reward offered by Gayle's family. Despite the call of a Missouri prosecutor to call off the execution, Williams died on September 24 at the Eastern Reception Diagnostic and Correctional Center in Bonne Terre, Missouri.
The pro-life movement's end is to protect human life. Abortion is a direct threat to this goal, but it is increasingly clear that our system of capital punishment is as well. The call is not to appease liberal opponents, nor should it be a weak-wristed olive branch offered to the liberal elites. The call for our movement is to pursue truth and justice. And the truth is that the capital punishment system is taking innocent lives. For others, execution is the end to a complicated story where truth may never be known. In a criminal system that is overloaded and understaffed, consistent justice is unattainable.
A question that must be considered is whether there is ever a time when capital punishment is justified. For the defender of life, the answer is no. Even when prosecuting the most heinous crimes, the government still depends on a flawed system. This system is one of eyewitness accounts that can be corrupted by the motives and personal animosities of the individual witness. One can point to the most infamous of American crimes, such as the 1969 murders committed by the Manson Family in Los Angeles, and still find a case full of flawed eyewitness accounts and personal grievances. Moreover, investigators and prosecutors are not infallible nor immune to biases, as we saw in the Central Park Five case. While the justice system can be reasonably certain of guilt, the certainty that would merit execution is largely impossible.
In addition to the infallibility of humans as witnesses and investigators, researchers are beginning to understand more about the link between trauma and criminal behavior. In 1993, FBI profiler Robert Ressler wrote an account of his research into the minds of convicted murderers. Between 1979 and 1983, Ressler interviewed thirty-six convicted murderers across the United States. While there was a diversity of age, race, and life experiences, one aspect of their stories was consistent: Ressler found that every single convicted murderer he interviewed was subjected to serious abuse as a child. These findings are important because researchers are also finding out more about the ability to heal and reverse the damage done by trauma. With the right help, those convicted of violent crimes can, in fact, change.
These arguments against capital punishment are not arguments against life in prison. Justice is a vital part of our system and the families of victims deserve to see that our culture takes crime seriously. This is also not an argument for an overly therapeutic view of restorative justice. In fact, many violent offenders will remain violent. Rather, this is an argument for a limited government that understands the complexity of human life. The pro-life movement has the opportunity to save more lives and limit the abuse of government by calling for an end to capital punishment.