The next execution, of inmate Freddie Eugene Owens, is still pending and is scheduled for September 20. It would be the first execution in South Carolina in more than 13 years after the court allowed the execution chamber to reopen last month.

But in setting Owens’ execution date for Friday, the court also approved a request from four other death row inmates who had not been appealed, asking that the state wait at least three months between executions.

In their response, prosecutors proposed setting the minimum interval between executions at no more than four weeks.

Currently, the Supreme Court can schedule executions up to a week apart. This accelerated schedule would put pressure on lawyers who must represent multiple death row inmates, a lawyer for the inmates wrote in court documents.

Prison staff must make extensive preparations for the execution of an inmate and this can lead to botched executions, said attorney Lindsey Vann.

Neither argument was a good reason to wait three months. The prosecutors responded that they had offered a delay of up to four weeks.

“The Department of Corrections employees are prepared to perform their duties as required by law with professionalism and dignity,” wrote Assistant Attorney General Melody Brown in a response written after discussions with prison officials.

It is not immediately known when the judges will make a decision.

South Carolina has had a history of executions in rapid succession before. In December 1998, two half-brothers were executed in one night. More executions followed on the next two Fridays of the month, and two more in January 1999.

Owens, 46, has until the end of next week to decide whether he wants to die by lethal injection, the electric chair or firing squad. His lawyers said he is waiting this week for prison officials to submit an affidavit about the purity, potency and quality of the lethal injection poison, a new state law that restricts the release of information about execution procedures, and whether the declaration will satisfy both state and federal courts.

The last execution in South Carolina took place in 2011. Since then, the expiration date of the three drugs the state used to kill inmates has expired and prison authorities have been unable to obtain more.

To resume executions, lawmakers changed the lethal injection protocol to use only one drug and introduced a firing squad.

“Timely executions carry a high risk of error because the last execution was quite some time ago, one method is outdated and the other two are untested,” Vann said.

The inmates’ motion includes interviews in newspaper articles in which various prison officials spoke about the difficulties of carrying out executions or working closely with prisoners sentenced to death.

Inmates in South Carolina are demanding 13 weeks between executions, citing problems Oklahoma encountered when it tried to speed up the pace of executions there, which led to problems carrying out death sentences. Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond said in January 2023 that carrying out an execution every month puts a strain on prison staff.

Prosecutors wrote that Oklahoma’s death penalty laws are different and cannot be compared to South Carolina’s execution procedures.

Owens was convicted of killing a Greenville clerk during a convenience store robbery in 1997.

The following other South Carolina inmates whose convictions have not been appealed are:

– Richard Moore, 59, convicted of killing a Spartanburg supermarket clerk in 1999.

— Brad Sigmon, 66, was convicted of beating his estranged girlfriend’s parents to death with a baseball bat in Greenville County in 2001.

— Marion Bowman, 44, was convicted of killing an Orangeburg woman and setting her body on fire in 2001 because she owed him money.

— Mikal Mahdi, 41, was convicted of shooting an off-duty police officer and setting his body on fire in his Calhoun County home in 2004.

There are currently 32 inmates on death row in South Carolina.