Jan. 31 (UPI) — South Carolina’s Marion Bowman Jr. became first person executed in the United States in 2025 on Friday after the U.S. Supreme Court and Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals declined to hear his case.
Bowman, 44, was executed by lethal injection at approximately 6:27 p.m. at the Broad River Correctional Institution, the South Carolina Department of Corrections said in a statement issued to media outlets.
South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster declined clemency for Bowman Friday afternoon despite the inmate’s decision not to seek it, clearing the way for his execution. No South Carolina governor has commuted a death sentence to life in prison since the state restarted its death penalty in 1976.
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.
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.
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,” he 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.”
The American Civil Liberties Union of South Carolina pleaded with McMaster to spare Bowman’s life on Friday.
ACLU Communications Director Paul Bowers issued the call from a lectern in the lobby of the State House in Columbia, calling Bowman “a man who maintains his innocence of this capital crime. A man who has no physical evidence tying him to the crime. A man who did not receive a fair day in court. A changed man who has done his best to change himself in a dehumanizing environment. A man who has retained his humanity despite it all.”
