McMaster has the power to commute death row inmate sentence. Will the SC governor use it?

When Freddie Owens is brought into the death chamber in the early evening of Sept. 20 at South Carolina Department of Corrections Broad River Correctional Institution to be executed, Gov. Henry McMaster and Attorney General Alan Wilson will be on the phone listening in.

That phone call will start 15 minutes before Owens’ execution.

It will be the first time McMaster, who previously served as attorney general, will have the ability to commute a death sentence. But the decision, or the announcement of his decision, won’t come until shortly before the lethal injection is scheduled to begin.

“If the law has been followed, and I believe, in this case that it has been, but until we get to the last moments, on September, the 20th, no statement should be made as to what will happen at that moment,” McMaster said.

A coalition of clergy, civil rights leaders and others Wednesday called on McMaster to grant Owens clemency.

“No one should take a life. Not even the State of South Carolina. Only God can do that,” said the Rev. David Kennedy of the Laurens County NAACP and New Beginning Missionary Baptist Church. “There has to be another way to hold people accountable. The death penalty is traumatizing.”

South Carolinians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty launched a petition , which now has more than 2,500 signatures calling for clemency.

“To those lawmakers who so strongly claim that they are pro-life, and specifically Gov. McMaster, I want to ask: Why are you all OK with letting a man be executed next week?” said Hayden Laye, president of Democrats for Life of South Carolina. “Because we know that executing Mr. Owens next week will solve none of the issues that face our great state today. Executing Mr. Owens will not bring any sort of justice, it will only bring more pain and suffering.”

Owens is scheduled to be the first execution carried out since 2011 . Executions have been on hold because the state had difficulty obtaining lethal injection drugs.

Lawmakers eventually passed a shield law and expanded options for prisoners to be executed .

“Justice has been delayed for too long in South Carolina,” McMaster said when the S.C. Department of Corrections notified the state Supreme Court that the agency obtained the drugs necessary to carry out a lethal injection execution. “This filing brings our state one step closer to being able to once again carry out the rule of law and bring grieving families and loved ones the closure they are rightfully owed.”

During the process of an execution, the governor and attorney general are on the phone with the prison warden. The phone call, which is required to be on landlines, will commence about 5:45 p.m. Sept. 20. SCDC Director Bryan Stirling also is scheduled to be on the phone call.

The warden will ask the attorney general if there are any pending legal issues that will prevent the execution from being carried out. Presuming the attorney general says no, the warden asks the governor if he will exercise clemency. If the governor says no, the execution goes forward.

The attorney general and governor stay on the phone during the execution, listening to a narration as the sentence is carried out. For lethal injections, for instance, the governor and attorney general are told when drugs are being administered, when the prison officials are checking for a pulse and when a doctor comes in to pronounce the prisoner deceased.

The warden then tells the governor and attorney general the sentence has been carried out and they end the call.

McMaster has not said publicly what he will do with Owens’ sentence and whether he will exercise his clemency power. It’s a tradition governors have followed. Instead, he will make his statement when the warden calls upon the governor.

McMaster, who is slated to be accompanied by lawyers from his counsel’s office, hasn’t witnessed an execution, but he has listened to narrations by warden when he was attorney general.

Staffers in the governors office say McMaster is acutely familiar with the details in the case of Owens, who was convicted of killing Speedway gas station clerk Irene Graves during an armed robbery in the early morning hours of Nov. 1, 1997.

Still McMaster would not say whether he will grant clemency in Owens’ case until moments before the scheduled execution. But it’s one decision that only he can make.

“It’s just part of the job. It’s an important event for a lot of people for a lot of very good reasons. But it’s simply one of these things that the governor of this state has to do,” McMaster told reporters when asked how much the decision on whether grant clemency weighs on him.