South Carolina has executed their first death row prisoner this year, Marion Bowman Jr., who has been in prison since 2002 after being found guilty of killing a friend - though Bowman maintained he wa

The state executed Bowman for the 2001 murder of 21-year-old Kandee Martin, a young mother who was killed five days before her son's second birthday.

After the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the final appeal of a South Carolina inmate, he decided not to ask the governor for clemency, saying he didn't want to spend the rest of his life in prison for a murder he has always insisted he did not commit.

South Carolina has put 45 inmates to death since the death penalty was restarted in the U.S. in 1976. In the early 2000s, it was carrying out an average of three executions a year. Nine states have put more inmates to death.

South Carolina is preparing to execute the third inmate to be put to death since September as the state goes through a backlog of prisoners who exhausted their appeals while the state couldn't find lethal injection drugs.