South Carolina prepares for its 6th execution in 9 months with a man serving 2 death sentences

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — A South Carolina man sent to death row twice for separate murders is scheduled to die Friday by lethal injection in the state’s sixth execution in nine months.

Stephen Stanko, 57, is being killed for shooting a friend and then cleaning out his bank account in Horry County in 2005. Hours earlier Stanko killed his live-in girlfriend, strangling her as he raped her teenage daughter in the woman’s home in neighboring Georgetown County. He slit the teen’s throat but she survived. Stanko also ended up on death row for that crime.

Stanko was leaning toward dying by South Carolina’s new firing squad, like two inmates before him. But after autopsy results from the last inmate killed by that method showed the bullets from the three volunteers nearly missed his heart, Stanko went with lethal injection.

Stanko is the last of four executions scheduled around the country this week. Florida and Alabama each put an inmate to death on Tuesday. On Wednesday, Oklahoma executed a man transferred from federal to state custody to allow his death.

Last efforts to save Stanko’s life

There are a couple of long-shot efforts to spare his life. Stanko can appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court after a federal judge refused this week to stop his execution. Stanko’s lawyers said the state isn’t carrying out lethal injection properly after autopsy results found fluid in the lungs of other inmates killed that way.

Or South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster could offer clemency. That decision won’t be made until a phone call prison officials make to the governor minutes before every execution. Stanko’s execution is set to start at 6 p.m. at a Columbia prison.

A governor has not spared a death row inmate’s life in the previous 48 executions since South Carolina reinstated the death penalty about 50 years ago.

What will happen to Stanko in the death chamber

Stanko will be strapped to a gurney in the state’s death chamber. An IV line, placed before witnesses enter the room, will stretch into a wall behind him.

He will be given at least one massive dose of the powerful sedative pentobarbital. In previous South Carolina executions, prison officials have given inmates a second dose of the drug after 10 minutes when their hearts have shown sporadic electrical impulses because the organ is the last to use the body’s stored oxygen.

Lawyers for Stanko said the procedure shows inmates suffer. But a federal judge pointed out Wednesday that witnesses to all three South Carolina lethal injection deaths in the past nine months said the inmates took several breaths, some that sounded like snores, then stopped breathing and lost consciousness within one to two minutes.

Stanko’s two murders across two counties

Stanko is being executed for killing his 74-year-old friend Henry Turner. Stanko went to Turner’s home in April 2005 after lying about his father dying and then shot Turner twice while using a pillow as a silencer, authorities said.

Stanko stole Turner’s truck, cleaned out his bank account and then spent the next few days in Augusta, Georgia, where he told people in town for the Masters Tournament that he owned several Hooters restaurants. He stayed with a woman who took him to church. She then called police once she saw his photo and that he was wanted, police said.

Hours before killing Turner, Stanko beat and strangled his girlfriend in her home and raped her daughter before slashing the teen’s throat. The daughter survived and testified against him at one of his trials.

“Stephen Stanko is just plain evil. He has, in his core, down deep inside, something that makes him evil. He’s a bad man, he knows it, and he likes it. He doesn’t turn away from it. He will hide it. He’s very, very, very good at hiding it, but you cannot equate evil with insanity,” then-prosecutor Greg Hembree said in his closing statement at one of Stanko’s trials.

Hembree later became a state senator and was the chief sponsor of the 2021 law allowing South Carolina to use a firing squad.