Marion Bowman will be 3rd inmate in the death chamber since September
By Skylar Laird
SCDailyGazette.com
COLUMBIA — Marion Bowman will be the third inmate to face the death chamber since the state restarted executions in September, according to a notice Friday, Jan. 3, from the state Supreme Court.
Bowman, 44, is slated for execution Jan. 31. By state law, executions take place four Fridays after a death warrant is issued. Bowman’s warrant, initially expected in November, was put on hold for the winter holidays.
Bowman was convicted in May 2002 of killing a woman, then putting her body in the trunk of her car and setting it on fire. He is expected to be the third of at least six death row inmates executed in the coming months.
For years, the state could not carry out executions because it couldn’t get the drugs used for lethal injection. Legislators added death by firing squad as an option for inmates. Executions resumed after the Supreme Court ruled July 31 that firing squad and electrocution are constitutionally allowed.
Lethal injection is again an option after corrections officials found a supply of the drug pentobarbital in 2023, with the help of a new law keeping everything about the drug secret. The two inmates executed since September, Freddie Owens and Richard Moore, both died by lethal injection.
Bowman will have until Jan. 17 to decide his method of execution. If he doesn’t make a choice, the default is the electric chair.
“I’ll soon be scheduled to be shot, electrocuted or drugged to death,” Bowman wrote in a statement released by his attorneys last month.
Bowman’s crime
On Feb. 16, 2001, Bowman stopped outside a house in Dorchester County to speak with 21-year-old Kandee Martin, according to court documents.
Bowman’s sister, who had been driving him, later testified in court that Bowman accused Martin of owing him money. When Martin didn’t respond, Bowman told her she would “be dead by dark,” his sister testified.
Later that day, Martin drove up with Bowman in the car to a house where many of Bowman’s friends had been drinking. Bowman told his cousin, James Taiwan Gadson, to get in the car. Bowman directed Martin to drive to a remote area. She stopped, and he told her to get out of the car. As she did, Bowman told Gadson he believed Martin was wearing a wire and he was going to kill her, Gadson testified.
Martin turned around to get back in the car, and Bowman started shooting. Gadson heard three gunshots before Martin said, “Don’t shoot me no more, I have a child to take care of,” Gadson later testified. Bowman shot twice more, Gadson said.
Bowman dragged Martin’s body into a nearby wooded area, then drove her car back to town. He drove the car around that evening, trying once unsuccessfully to sell it. Around 3 a.m., he asked a friend, Travis Felder, for help parking a car. Felder followed Bowman in his own car to the spot where Bowman had earlier killed Martin, Felder testified.
Bowman retrieved Martin’s body from the woods, put her in the trunk of the car and lit it on fire, Felder testified. An autopsy revealed she had been shot to death, and a vaginal swab found traces of Bowman’s DNA, according to court documents.
Bowman was convicted of murder and arson in 2002.
Statement
Bowman maintains that he didn’t kill Martin.
Instead, he claims he wasn’t involved in her death at all and that Gadson killed her. Bowman claims his only involvement was hearing Gadson confess to the crime, according to a statement his attorneys released Dec. 19.
Feb. 16, 2001, started like any other, Bowman wrote in the statement. He got up early and ran into his sister, who agreed to drive him to a friend’s house. While there with Gadson, who Bowman called by the nickname “Gap,” Martin arrived.
Bowman said Martin bought crack from him, adding he’d started dealing because he “could never make ends meet,” even when working manual labor jobs, he wrote.
“Kandee was an addict, and I very much regret, and am sorry, for my part in contributing to that,” Bowman wrote. “She was a friend of mine, and I still took advantage of her addiction.”
Martin gave Bowman her wristwatch in exchange for drugs, he wrote. Investigators would later use the watch to link Bowman to the crime, arguing he had taken it after killing her.
Bowman was married at the time. But he said he and Martin were having an affair, which explained why a forensic examination found his DNA on a vaginal swab, he wrote.
Gadson left the party alone with Martin, Bowman wrote, saying he went home alone. The next time he saw Gadson, he was driving Martin’s car and asking Bowman to go clubbing with him and some friends. Bowman wrote that he agreed and drove the group to the bar, assuming Martin had lent Gadson her car for the evening.
Among the friends was Hiram Johnson, who later testified that Bowman confessed to killing Martin that evening. In his statement, Bowman claimed it was Gadson who made the confession, waiting until everyone else had left the car to tell Bowman that Martin was dead.
“I didn’t believe him or know what to say,” Bowman wrote. He got out of the car and got a ride home with Felder, the friend prosecutors claimed drove Bowman back to the crime scene, he wrote.
The next day, police arrested Bowman and charged him with kidnapping and killing Martin, then setting her body on fire. His attorneys repeatedly offered him plea deals, pointing out that he could avoid the death penalty if he signed on, but Bowman refused to admit to a crime he says he did not commit, he wrote in his statement.
“I have done some things in life I regret,” Bowman wrote. “I regret the role I had in dealing to Kandee and know that her addiction probably led to her death. But I did not do this.”
Arguments
In a last-ditch effort to get Bowman off death row, his current attorneys argued that prosecutors withheld evidence, his own attorneys during the trail were racist, and he has improved himself during his time in prison.
“Allowing this execution to proceed despite significant and unresolved doubt about Marion’s conviction and the serious flaws in the original trial is unconscionable,” Lindsey Vann, an attorney with Justice360, said in a statement Friday.
The petition, filed Dec. 16, points to a confession one inmate claimed Gadson made while in prison, saying he was the one to kill Martin instead of Bowman. An evaluation also raised questions about Gadson’s mental health, potentially casting doubt on Gadson’s credibility, the attorneys argued.
Those reports, which attorneys claim prosecutors did not provide to Bowman’s legal team, could have swayed the jury in Bowman’s favor, the petition reads.
Attorneys representing Bowman have raised the same concerns repeatedly, to no avail, attorneys for the state replied in their own filing Monday. The state Attorney General’s Office called on the state Supreme Court to abide by those earlier rulings.
“In total, (Bowman) has attempted to litigate these claims for nearly two full decades, and he has been turned away on this issue by 20 different judges or justices over that timeframe,” the filing reads.
The argument that Bowman’s own defense team was racist lacks evidence to back it up, the state’s attorneys continued. Bowman’s current lawyers cited several instances in which they said his original attorney referred to Martin as a “little girl,” or “little white girl,” implying her innocence to the jury, according to the petition.
But the court transcript doesn’t support that the attorney called Martin a “little white girl,” and calling her a “little girl” is not enough to prove he was racist, the state argued. Neither is the fact that attorneys mentioned to Bowman before the trial that he may face an uphill battle as a Black man accused of killing a white woman, prosecutors wrote.
“It is not racist to recognize and express concern for the potential racism of others,” the response reads. “Such was not an injection of racism into the trial, it was a warning to Bowman about the realities of our world and the potential pitfalls that may accompany his case beyond the substantial evidence the State was prepared to offer against him.”
Focusing on Martin’s drug addiction and other shortcomings, which defense attorneys argued lawyers omitted out of racism, would have been “an ill-advised strategy that, in light of the record, is just as bad as it sounds,” the filing continues.
Defense attorneys’ arguments that Bowman is a changed man don’t hold any weight in a legal appeal, the state’s attorneys added. The court should consider only the legal evidence surrounding his initial trial and sentencing, leaving the decision on whether to commute his sentence up to the governor, as is laid out in state law, the filing reads.
“The law does not permit (Bowman) to present a 20 years post-trial case in mitigation based upon his behavior in prison and this Court does not serve the role of a super-jury,” the filing reads.
During his more than 22 years on death row, Bowman has garnered a reputation as a “gentle giant,” according to his attorneys’ filing. He received a job sweeping floors and collecting lunch trays, which is coveted among inmates because it means more time out of the cells. He talks often to his wife and his daughter, who was born six months after his arrest, as well as his young granddaughter.
Bowman reads the Bible daily and writes poetry, his attorneys have said.
“I’m still breathing, so this I know,” he wrote in a poem his attorneys published online.
“While I breathe, I hope,” he wrote, which is the translation of South Carolina’s official moto in Latin: Dum spiro spero.
Skylar Laird covers the South Carolina Legislature and criminal justice issues. Originally from Missouri, she previously worked for The Post and Courier’s Columbia bureau. S.C. Daily Gazette is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.
