On January 31, South Carolina carried out the first execution in 2025 when it put Marion Bowman to death by lethal injection. The second occurred in Texas last night, with eleven more executions now scheduled over the course of the rest of the year.
Bowman was convicted of killing Kandee Martin in 2001. As USA Today reports, “Police found Martin’s bullet-ridden body in the trunk of her own car, which had been set on fire.”
When he was brought to trial, prosecutors said Bowman “killed Martin over a drug-related dispute. Bowman said he sold drugs to Martin, who was a friend of his for years, and sometimes she would pay with sex, but he denied killing her.”
While critics of capital punishment often focus on the cruelty of one or another of the methods of execution used in this country, Bowman’s case illustrates the cruelties that haunt capital punishment at every stage.
One of those is the particular horror of someone who knows they are innocent but cannot convince courts of that fact. One of those people, Kwame Ajamu, who was falsely convicted of a capital crime in Ohio, captured that horror when he said: “I did not understand what was happening to me or how it could happen. At first I begged God for mercy, but soon it dawned on me that there would be no mercy coming.”
Even before the guards put Ajamu in his cell, they walked him past the room containing Ohio’s electric chair. “One of the guards really wanted me to see that chair. I’ll never forget his words: ‘That’s gonna be your hot date.’”
Or as Anthony Graves, who spent many years on Texas’ death row before being proven innocent in 2010, puts it, “a death sentence for an innocent person…comes with…physical, emotional, and psychological torture.”
Graves says, “What I didn’t know then was that this wrongful death sentence was only part of the torture I would experience for the next 18-and-a-half years. I didn’t know that I would be forced to live in an 8×12 cage…. I didn’t know that for years on end I would have no physical contact with a single human being.”
“I didn’t know,” Graves goes on, “that guards would feed me like a dog through a slot in my door.…. I lived behind a steel door with filthy mesh-covered windows…. With its peeling, old, and dull paint, my cage was the image of an abandoned one-room project apartment.”
“If I had known when I was sentenced, all I would have to go through before I would win my freedom,” Graves concludes, “I don’t know if even my faith in my own innocence would have been enough to sustain me.”
From the moment Marion Bowman was arrested to the moment he died, he displayed similar faith in his own innocence. Many death row inmates make similar claims, and many of them truly are innocent.
But Bowman backed up his words with actions that risked, and eventually cost, his life.
Early in his ordeal, he refused plea deals that would have taken the death penalty off the table and substituted a sentence of life in prison. He did so because, as he explained, he did not kill Martin.
He contended that the prosecutor “offered me life 13 times and once even said that I could say ‘not guilty’ and still accept a life sentence.” Bowman’s resistance to the plea deal that would have spared his life makes his case quite unusual.
As Professor Susan Ehrhard explains, “The option to file a death notice puts the prosecution in a unique position of strength and affects the defense’s decision regarding a plea in ways that a potential sentence of life or life without parole does not…. [P]rosecutors use the death penalty as leverage to induce a defendant to forgo the constitutional right to trial by jury.”
That is why people accused of capital crimes rarely refuse plea deals.
A study of murder cases in large urban counties provides evidence for that proposition. It found that in jurisdictions with the death penalty, “more defendants pleaded guilty to avoid the risk of capital punishment. Without the death penalty, fewer defendants would have pleaded guilty, resulting in more murder cases going to trial.”
Just before he was executed, Bowman took the unusual step of refusing to seek clemency. He again insisted that an innocent man should not have to spend the rest of his life in prison, even if it meant he would be put to death
As an article in South Carolina’s Post and Courier noted, “On the eve of his execution date, Bowman’s legal team said he has made the ‘painful decision’ to forgo applying for executive clemency as he maintains his innocence….” It quoted one of Bowman’s lawyers who said that his client “‘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.’”
“After more than two decades of battling a broken system that has failed him at every turn, Marion’s decision is a powerful refusal to legitimize an unjust process that has already stolen so much of his life.”
Like many of the people who end up on death row, Bowman was convicted based on testimony provided by two men also charged in Martin’s death, who testified against him in exchange for reduced sentences. In addition, “he didn’t get a vigorous defense because his lawyer was racist and worried about what a jury in 2002 South Carolina would think about a Black man and a white woman in a relationship.”
But at the end of the day, none of that mattered. The United States Supreme Court refused to grant a stay so courts “could hear more arguments over whether his trial attorney had too much sympathy for the white victim to put on a vigorous defense….”
Before he was brought to South Carolina’s death chamber on the last day of January, he had been subject to one more gratuitous indignity.
As an article in The Guardian explained, “For 135 days, Marion Bowman Jr. … [had] been locked in a solitary cell narrower than his arm span, cut off from nearly all human interaction, counting down the days until the state of South Carolina execute[d] him.”
Typically, “men on South Carolina death row live in single cells with a bed, desk and locker. They can eat meals in a communal area and do group recreation, including handball. But when the state declares that defendants have exhausted their appeals, it can place them on “execution status”, removing their few basic privileges.”
That is what South Carolina did to Marion Bowman.
As Bowman explained, “The men on death row ‘take care of each other when they aren’t kept apart – remembering birthdays, helping people prepare for difficult family conversations, sharing commissary items, offering grief support.’”
But even that modest comfort was removed from Bowman. The Guardian captures the devastating cruelty of “Knowing the day you will be killed…. But facing that alone in a tiny cell for weeks or months on end is,” The Guardian observes, “unfathomable.”
Unfathomable indeed, but not unintentional. Sadly, it is an integral part of America’s death penalty system.
There, cruelty abounds, as it did in the Bowman case, long before anyone is executed.
