South Carolina court rejects death row appeal days before execution

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COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — South Carolina's highest court has refused to stop the execution of a man who killed three people over five days more than 20 years ago while leaving taunting messages for police in the blood of one of his victims.

Stephen Bryant, 44, is scheduled to die at 6 p.m. Friday by firing squad at a Columbia prison.

Lawyers for Bryant made a last ditch appeal arguing the judge who sentenced him to die never got to consider how badly his brain was damaged from his mother’s alcohol and drug use while pregnant.

But the South Carolina Supreme Court rejected that appeal late Monday writing that even if Bryant's defense had done more investigation into whether he had Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder, it simply would have given a different reason for his problems while not changing the outcome of a death sentence.

“By any stretch, (Bryant) demonstrated a high level of planning, decision making, and calculation,” the justices wrote in Monday's unanimous decision.

Bryant is being executed for killing Willard “TJ” Tietjen in his home in October 2004. Investigators said Bryant burned Tietjen’s eyes with cigarettes after shooting him and painted “catch me if u can” and other taunting messages on the wall with the victim’s blood.

Prosecutors said he also shot and killed two men he was giving rides to as they stepped out of his truck to urinate over five days that terrorized Sumter County.

In what may be their final appeal. Bryant’s lawyers said while his original defense team said he was unnerved in the months before the killings because he couldn’t stop thinking about being sexually abused by relatives as a child, they didn’t detail how that abuse had affected his ability to conform to the law.

Bryant’s lawyers said he didn’t get a full brain scan before his 2008 trial that could have identified in-utero damage that was never repaired, according to court papers.

They also included what they said was newly uncovered evidence including a 2024 interview with a clinical psychologist where Bryant described abuse he suffered from male relatives, his mother, a preacher’s wife and several strippers in his neighborhood before he became a teenager.

The justices sided with prosecutors who said the three killings, along with another shooting and two burglaries mostly along dirt roads in the rural Sumter County east of Columbia weren’t impulsive crimes from a damaged brain but were methodical and cunning.

Bryant can still ask the governor to reduce his death sentence to life in prison in a decision that, if made, won’t be announced until minutes before the execution is set to start. No South Carolina governor has ever granted clemency in the modern era of the death penalty.

Bryant will be the third man executed by firing squad in South Carolina this year.

Struggles to find drugs to use for lethal injection led to an unintended 13-year pause in executions and state lawmakers to introduce the method that’s often associated with mutinies and desertion in armies, as frontier justice in America’s Old West or as a tool of terror and political repression in the former Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.

Outside of South Carolina, only three other prisoners in the U.S. have been executed by firing squad since 1977. All were in Utah, most recently Ronnie Lee Gardner in 2010.

Bryant’s execution will be the seventh in South Carolina since executions restarted in September 2024. All the others have chosen execution by lethal injection after the state was able to obtain the drug needed because of a secrecy law. The state also has an electric chair.

Bryant will have a hood placed on his head before he is shot by three volunteers from 15 feet (4.6 meters) away.