South Carolina is set to execute Marion Bowman Jr. on Friday night in the first U.S. execution in 2025. Photo courtesy South Carolina Department of Corrections
South Carolina’s Marion Bowman Jr. is set to be the first person executed in the United States in 2025 Friday after the U.S. Supreme Court and Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals declined to hear his case.
Bowman could have asked the South Carolina governor for clemency but declined to, clearing the way for his execution. Advertisement
Bowman was 20 at the time of the shooting death of Kandee Martin, 21, and was sentenced to death in 2002. He was accused of putting her body in the trunk of a car and setting it on fire after the fire.
South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster has the power to commute Bowman’s death sentence but no South Carolina governor has commuted a death sentence to life in prison since the state restarted its death penalty in 1976.
Bowman’s attorneys said racial bias was involved in his case. Bowman was Black and Martin was White. He asked for higher courts to pause his execution so that a probe of his prosecution could be examined.
“All confidence in Marion Bowman Jr.’s conviction and death sentence is undermined by his trial attorney who filtered his professional judgment 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 the case,” Bowman’s lawyers had said in court filings, according to The State. Advertisement
Bowman has maintained his innocence throughout, saying he would sell Martin drugs, and she was a friend of his. He blamed her death on a cousin who testified against him.
“I am so sorry for Kandee and her family, but I did not do it,” Bowman said in a statement posted online. Her family has suffered a loss that cannot be undone. … I know this won’t bring them satisfaction, but this is my truth.”
