COLUMBIA, S.C. (WIS) – The death penalty is back under focus across South Carolina.
Last week, the solicitor in Horry County announced he is seeking capital punishment for a convicted murderer whose federal death sentence President Joe Biden commuted shortly before leaving office.
Days later, South Carolina’s attorney general put pressure on the Richland County solicitor to pursue the death penalty for a murder earlier this year.
A current and a former solicitor, who have both prosecuted death penalty cases, said deciding whether to pursue capital punishment is not a choice made lightly.
“At the end of the day, we have to do something that’s different: We have to go to a jury and not only ask them to find somebody guilty but also ask them to say that person needs to die,” 14th Circuit Solicitor Duffie Stone said.
As deputy solicitor, Stone led the prosecution in the 2003 trial of Tyree Roberts, who was convicted of shooting and killing two Beaufort County deputies.
He is now one of 24 men on South Carolina’s death row.
“He laid in wait for them. He killed them with a Chinese assault rifle, basically ambushing both of them, that neither one of them had a chance,” Stone said.
House Speaker Pro Tem Tommy Pope was the solicitor during Susan Smith’s murder trial in Union County in 1995.
While a jury convicted Smith of murdering her two young children — after she initially claimed to be the victim of a carjacking — they sentenced her to life in prison, where she remains.
“I didn’t think she should be treated different because she reminds me of my daughter or my wife or my coworker. I thought she needed to be fed out of the same spoon that the carjacker would have,” Pope said.
Both Smith and Roberts were eligible for the death penalty because they were accused of killing children younger than 12 and law enforcement officers, respectively.
Both are among the factors laid out in state law, called aggravating circumstances, that prosecutors must meet to seek capital punishment for murder in South Carolina.
Others include if the defendant committed other violent crimes while committing murder, such as kidnapping, sexual assault, or burglary; if they had a prior conviction for murder; or if they killed two or more people in the same act.
Then, unlike a murder trial in which the state is not seeking capital punishment, they have to hold additional proceedings after a guilty verdict for the jury to decide if the person convicted will be sentenced to die.
That could mean the difference between a trial that takes a few days and one that takes weeks or longer.
“What you have to do, for starters, is feel very confident in your ability to convict,” Pope said. “You have to do justice within the confines of our system, not simply do either what the victims are saying or what the public hue and cry is. So a lot goes into it. It’s not something you want to rush.”
In the last 11 years, just four men have been sentenced to death in South Carolina, none since 2019.
As to why death penalty convictions are rarer today than a few decades ago, Stone and Pope noted a few potential factors, including the state’s inability to carry out executions for several years because of a lethal injection drug shortage and a mid-1990s change in state law that bars convicted murderers from early release.
Before that, a sentence of life in prison did not necessarily mean a person would spend the rest of their life behind bars.
“For the victim’s sake, I think life without parole has a lot of closure,” said Pope, who now works as a personal injury lawyer after retiring as solicitor.
They both said while the ultimate decision on whether to seek capital punishment rests with the solicitor, they discuss it with the victim’s family and take their feelings into account. Pope recalled that in at least one case, he opted not to pursue it because victims’ loved ones opposed it.
Stone also pointed to the advancement of technology and available evidence among the chief differences between his cases now and in his earlier years in the 14th Circuit Solicitor’s Office, which covers Allendale, Beaufort, Colleton, Hampton and Jasper counties.
“I am now trying cases in which the evidence I use didn’t exist 20 years ago,” he said.
Last Tuesday, South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson wrote a letter to Fifth Circuit Solicitor Byron Gipson, urging him to seek the death penalty against Alexander Dickey, who has been accused of murdering 22-year-old Logan Federico in Columbia in May, during what authorities described as a crime spree.
In the letter, Wilson, who is running for governor, told Gipson, “If you or your staff feel unable to proceed forward with this decision, please understand that this Office stands ready to assume that responsibility after the appropriate review of the evidence,” saying he expected to know the solicitor’s decision by Oct 10.
In his response the next day, Gipson wrote, “It would be reckless, irresponsible, and unethical for my office to make this decision without first having conducted a comprehensive review of all evidence in the case. To make such a determination a mere four months into the case, without investing the due diligence necessary to conduct a thorough analysis of all facets of the evidence, would set a dangerous precedent.”
Because of the advanced technology available in the modern evidence-review process — ranging from touch DNA to cellphone and computer data — Stone said combing through it all thoroughly enough to make a responsible decision on whether to seek capital punishment can take years.
He said the implementation of arbitrary deadlines doesn’t work and could hurt a case’s prosecution.
“It’s something that you cannot decide on until you know everything there is to know about the case, and sometimes that takes months, and sometimes that takes even longer than a year or two,” he said.
Pope served as solicitor for Union and York counties for 13 years, while Stone has held his job for nearly 20 years.
Both say the number of times they have sought the death penalty is fewer than 10.
“The truth is, I considered the death penalty, at least internally, for every available case,” Pope said. “But I also tried to be very careful about not making that decision political because it’s our most stringent punishment we can have, and I think you don’t want to cheapen it by making it a political football.”
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