Columbia, SC – A man from South Carolina sent the death corridor twice for separate murders was executed on Friday by lethal injection in the sixth execution of the State in nine months.
Stephen Stanko, 57, was declared dead at 6:34 pm
He was executed for shooting a friend and then cleaning his bank account in Horry County in 2005.
The execution began after a final statement of 3 1/2 minutes in which Stanko apologized to his victims and asked not to be judged for the worst day of his life. Prison officials requested the first dose of the powerful sedative pentobarbital.
Stanko seemed to be saying words, turned to the families of the victims and then let several quick breaths out when his lips shuddered.
Stanko seemed to stop breathing after a minute. A prison employee requested a second dose of Pentobarbital approximately 13 minutes later. It was announced dead about 28 minutes after the execution began.
Stanko was also fulfilling a death sentence for killing his girlfriend at his home in Georgetown County hours before, strangling her while raping her teenage daughter. Stanko cuts the teenager’s throat, but she survived.
Stanko leaned towards the death of the new South Carolina shooting squad, like the last two inmates before him. But after the results of the autopsy of the last imprisonment killed by that method showed that the bullets of the three volunteers almost missed their heart, Stanko was with lethal injection.
Stanko was the last of the four scheduled executions throughout the country this week. Florida and Alabama killed an inmate on Tuesday. On Wednesday, Oklahoma executed a man transferred from federal to state to allow his death.
The federal courts rejected Stanko’s last effort to forgive his life when his lawyers argued that the State is not carrying out lethal injection properly after the autopsy results found fluids in the lungs of other prisoners killed in that way.
Also the governor of South Carolina, Henry McMaster, rejected clemency. In a phone call to prison officials, before execution began.
A governor has not saved the life of an death inmate in the previous 48
