In South Carolina, which on Friday will execute its first inmate since 2011, 43 convicted murderers have been executed by the state since the death penalty was reinstated here in 1976. Few death row inmates have been acquitted in that time, but a substantial number have still managed to get off death row.
Four inmates were exonerated or saw their murder convictions and death sentences overturned:
▪ In 1979, Michael Linder, 24, shot and killed South Carolina state trooper Willie Peeples after a high-speed chase in Colleton County. Linder had been riding his motorcycle when Peeples attempted to make a traffic stop. Linder sped away on his motorcycle before crashing and shooting at Peeples with a .357-caliber Magnum handgun he kept in his motorcycle glove compartment.
Linder asserted that he did not fire first, but that he was acting in self-defense. A jury found him guilty of murder and he was sentenced to death, but two years later, Linder got another trial because the first jury was never told it could consider voluntary manslaughter as a charge.
Linder’s second jury found that he had acted in self-defense and he was released in 1981 after spending two years on death row.
▪ Spartanburg’s Jesse Keith Brown was convicted twice of beating to death John Horace McMillin in his Spartanburg home in 1983. Both convictions were overturned, and in his third trial in 1989, evidence was presented that Brown’s half-brother was the true killer. Brown’s murder conviction and death sentence were overturned, but he was still sentenced to 45 years in prison for armed robbery, grand larceny and entering without breaking.
▪ Warren Manning’s charges were dropped in 1999, following a decade of imprisonment for the alleged murder of George Radford, a South Carolina state trooper. Radford had been found dead in his patrol car in a Dillon County pond in October 1988. He had been shot twice in the head and beaten with his own revolver, according to news reports from the time.
Manning was tried five times before his acquittal in late 1999. He was convicted of the murder in 1989 and sentenced to death, but he appealed the ruling to the state Supreme Court, which overturned the decision citing inadequate jury instructions. The next attempt to try the case ended in a mistrial. Then in 1995 a jury once again convicted Manning of the murder only for the conviction to again be overturned, this time because of issues with jury selection. The fourth time Manning went to trial for Radford’s murder, it ended with a hung jury.
But in his fifth trial, the jury decided the evidence was circumstantial and Manning was found innocent in Radford’s killing.
▪ Joseph Ard was sentenced to death in 1996 for shooting to death his pregnant, 17-year-old girlfriend three years prior. Ard’s lawyers argued the shooting was accidental and said the shooting happened while Ard and his girlfriend were struggling for the weapon. A jury agreed in 2012 and Ard’s charges were reduced to involuntary manslaughter. He was given credit for time served and released.
Others find ways to get off death row
While examples of South Carolina death row inmates being exonerated are few, more people have escaped the death penalty by having their sentences or the charges reduced or otherwise changed through appeal.
According to the S.C. Department of Corrections, 20 inmates have made their way off death row since the state last executed someone in 2011, including seven who were deemed intellectually disabled; four due to an issue regarding their legal representation; three where juries were deemed to have not been clearly told they could consider a life sentence as an act of mercy, and three due to overly zealous or racially charged statements by prosecution.
The other three made different arguments about procedure in their initial trials — one where a juror with a hearing disability couldn’t properly understand testimony; one where a defendant’s right against self-incrimination was violated, and another where the trial judge was found not to have considered all favorable evidence during sentencing.
“It’s not uncommon to have death sentences resentenced. In fact, the frequency with which resentencing happens (and why it happens, like evidentiary errors and prosecutorial misconduct) is one of the main reasons we advocate for its end,” in South Carolina, said the Rev. Hillary Taylor, executive director of South Carolinians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty.
Since the state’s last execution, the Department of Corrections reports that four inmates have died on death row.
Convicted murderer Freddie Owens is scheduled to die by lethal injection at 6 p.m. Friday, Sept. 20. It will be the first execution carried out by the state in 13 years. He was convicted of the 1997 murder of Irene Grainger Graves, during an attempted robbery of a convenience store in Greenville County.
