Hours before Freddie Owens’ execution, friend who testified against him says he lied: “Freddie was not there”

Just hours 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. It will be South Carolina’s first execution in 13 years.

But Owens’ lawyers on Wednesday filed a sworn statement from the friend and co-defendant, Steven Golden, late Wednesday to try to stop South Carolina from carrying out the execution.

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.

On Wednesday, Golden signed another sworn statement saying Owens wasn’t at the store when Irene Graves was killed during a robbery.

Instead, he said he blamed Owens because he was high on cocaine and police put pressure on him by claiming they already knew the two were together and that Owens was talking. Golden also said he feared the real killer.

“I thought the real shooter or his associates might kill me if I named him to police. I am still afraid of that. But Freddie was not there,” Golden wrote in his statement, which does not name the other person.

Golden testified at Owens’ trial, saying prosecutors promised to consider his testimony in his favor, but he still faced the death penalty or life in prison. He was eventually sentenced to 28 years in prison after pleading guilty to a lesser charge of voluntary manslaughter, according to court records.

“I’m coming forward now because I know Freddie’s execution date is September 20 and I don’t want Freddie to be executed for something he didn’t do. This has weighed heavily on my mind and I want to have a clear conscience,” Golden wrote in his statement.

Prosecutors have said Golden wasn’t the only evidence linking Owens to the crime since other friends testified that they, along with Owens, had planned to rob the store. Those friends said Owens bragged to them about killing Graves. His former girlfriend also testified that he confessed to the killing.

There was surveillance video in the store, but it didn’t show the shooting clearly. Prosecutors never found the weapon used and didn’t present any scientific evidence linking Owens to the killing at his trial — although after Owens’ death sentence was overturned, prosecutors showed the man who killed the clerk was wearing a ski mask while the other man inside for the robbery had a stocking mask. They also linked the ski mask to Owens.

Prosecutors argued last week that Golden’s decision to change his story shouldn’t be enough to stop the execution because Golden has now admitted to lying under oath, thereby showing that he cannot be trusted to tell the truth.

“There is no indication that Golden will testify; there is no reasoning to why Owens would admit the shooting (of) Ms. Graves to officers, his girlfriend, and his mother if he was not the shooter as now claimed,” the state Attorney General’s Office wrote in court papers.

Also on Thursday, a group called South Carolinians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty presented a petition with more than 10,000 signatures to Gov. Henry McMaster’s office asking him to reduce Owens’ sentence to life in prison.

“Justice works for restoration. You cannot restore someone who you kill,” said the group’s executive director, Rev. Hillary Taylor, as she read from one of the comments on the petition.

McMaster, a Republican, has said he will wait to announce his decision on clemency until prison officials call him minutes before the execution begins.

Owens would be the first person executed in South Carolina in 13 years after the state struggled to obtain drugs needed for lethal injections because companies refused to sell them if they could be publicly identified.

The state added a firing squad option and passed a shield law to keep much of the details of executions private. The state Supreme Court then cleared the way for the death chamber to reopen this summer. That legislation also revived the state’s use of the electric chair.

Five other inmates are also out of appeals and the state can schedule executions every five weeks.

Earlier this year, attorneys representing a group of South Carolina’s death row inmates argued before the South Carolina Supreme Court that both electrocution and the firing squad as execution methods should constitute cruel and unusual punishment. 

In January, Alabama executed condemned inmate Kenneth Eugene Smith using nitrogen hypoxia, a controversial death penalty method used for the first time in the United States. Before the execution, the U.N. warned the method could “amount to torture” and violate human rights treaties.

According to the Death Penalty Information Center, there are 35 inmates on death row in South Carolina, and no clemencies have been granted in the state.