Overview

• Stephen Stanko, 57, was executed June 13 for the 2005 murders of his friend Henry Turner and his girlfriend Laura Ling and the rape and attempted killing of Ling’s teenage daughter.
• He had chosen lethal injection over the state’s newly authorized firing squad after an autopsy from a prior execution found volunteer marksmen had narrowly missed the heart.
• Federal courts rejected his final request to block the execution and Governor Henry McMaster denied clemency minutes before it began.
• In his three-and-a-half-minute final statement, Stanko apologized to the victims’ families and asked not to be judged by his worst day.
• The execution was the fourth carried out in the United States this week and the sixth in South Carolina in nine months as the state resumed capital punishments.