US Supreme Court denies final appeal for South Carolina man on death row, clearing way for execution

Ted Clifford, The State on Jan 30, 2025

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On Thursday, as all avenues for appeals closed, death row inmate Marion Bowman Jr. made the decision not to seek clemency from South Carolina’s governor.

Bowman announced this decision after the U.S. Supreme Court and the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals declined to take up separate appeals filed by Bowman and his attorneys.

The rulings, and Bowman’s decision, clears the way for him to be executed by lethal injection at 6 p.m. Eastern time Friday.

If the sentence is carried out, Bowman will be the first person executed in the United States this year. He will be the third person put to death in South Carolina since the state resumed executions last year following a 13-year pause.

Bowman was sentenced to death in 2002 for the murder the year before of 21-year-old Kandee Martin in Dorchester County. Bowman, who is Black, was convicted of shooting Martin, who was white, in the head before stuffing her body in the trunk of a car that he then set on fire. Bowman was 20 years old at the time of the murder.

In a statement on Bowman’s decision not to ask Gov. Henry McMaster for clemency, one of Bowman’s attorneys, Lindsey Vann, said, “Marion has steadfastly maintained his innocence of Kandee Martin’s murder, yet he has already spent more than half of his life on death row. He cannot in good conscience ask for a supposed mercy that would require him to spend the rest of his life in prison for a crime he did not commit.”

Bowman’s decision was announced following twin denials of his appeals. In a case before the U.S. Supreme Court, Bowman’s attorneys asked the court to halt his execution in order to examine whether Bowman’s conviction had been the result of racial prejudice.

“All confidence in Marion Bowman Jr.’s convictions and death sentence is undermined by his trial attorney who filtered his professional judgments through a presumption of racial bias by Bowman’s jury, only to repeatedly introduce and assign pernicious and prejudicial racial stereotypes to Bowman and the victim in this case,” Bowman’s attorneys alleged in their filing.

The court issued a notice of the denial Thursday. No judges dissented.

In a separate appeal before the federal Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, Bowman asked for his execution to be paused so that he could receive more information about the drugs used in South Carolina’s lethal injection, which Bowman chose as his method of execution. In South Carolina, that sentence is carried out by the use of a single dose of pentobarbital, a sedative that causes death by asphyxiation at high doses.

On Thursday, a group led by Rev. Hillary Taylor, executive director of South Carolinians for Alternatives for the Death Penalty, delivered a petition containing approximately 9,000 signatures to McMaster, asking him to commute Bowman’s sentence.

McMaster has the power to commute Bowman’s sentence to life in prison, but he has declined to do so in either of the two previous executions.

No governor has commuted a death sentence to life in prison since executions were restarted in South Carolina in 1976. Since then, there have been 45 executions in South Carolina.