USA –  A lawyer representing the first death row inmate likely to be executed in South Carolina since 2011 has decided that he should die by lethal injection after the prisoner refused to choose between three different killing methods, saying that to do so would be “akin to suicide”.

Freddie Owens is now set to be executed using a fatal dose of the sedative pentobarbital. The prisoner had been given until Friday to decide between the three execution methods: lethal injection, the electric chair and the firing squad. Owens had joined other death row inmates in objecting to both the electric chair and firing squad as cruel and unusual forms of punishment banned under the US constitution. He had also objected to signing the form that would decide between the three techniques on grounds that to do so would mean he were participating in his own killing – equivalent to suicide, he said, which is forbidden by his Muslim faith.

In the absence of a decision from the prisoner himself, Owens’ defense lawyer, Emily Paavola, to whom he had granted power of attorney, stepped in. She knew that if she failed to meet the Friday deadline, South Carolina would by default kill her client by electrocution; in that invidious position, she opted instead for lethal injection. In a statement, Paavola said: “I have known Mr Owens for 15 years. Under the circumstances, and in light of the information currently available to me, I made the best decision I felt I could make on his behalf.”

Owens was sentenced to capital punishment for the 1999 murder of a petrol station worker, Irene Graves, during a string of robberies. He is the first of five prisoners who have exhausted all their appeals and now face execution after a period of 13 years in which the state’s death chamber has gone unused. (The Guardian)…[+]