South Carolina’s highest court has refused to stay the execution of a man who killed three people more than 20 years ago and left taunting messages for police in the blood of one of his victims.
Stephen Bryant, 44, is expected to die Friday at 6 p.m. by shooting himself at a prison in Columbia.
Bryant’s lawyers filed a final appeal, arguing that the judge who sentenced him to death never considered the extent of his brain damage from his mother’s alcohol and drug use during pregnancy.
The court’s decision was unanimous
But the South Carolina Supreme Court rejected that appeal late Monday, writing that even if Bryant’s defense had done more research into whether he had fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, it simply would have given a different reason for his problems and would not have changed the outcome of the death sentence.
“Bryant demonstrated a high level of planning, decision-making and calculation,” the judges wrote in Monday’s unanimous decision.
Bryant was executed for killing Willard “TJ” Tietjen in his home in 2004. in October After shooting him, Bryant burned Tietjen’s eyes with cigarettes and painted “catch me if you can” and other taunts on the wall with the victim’s blood, investigators said.
Prosecutors said he also shot and killed two men he was driving after they got out of his truck to urinate during the five-day terror attack in Sumter County.
The appeal alleges extensive abuse and alcohol consumption by Bryant’s mother during pregnancy
In his latest appeal, Bryant’s lawyers said that while his original defense team noted that he was troubled in the months before the murders because he couldn’t stop thinking about being sexually abused by loved ones as a child, they did not detail how that abuse affected his ability to obey the law.
Bryant’s lawyers said that before 2008 trial, he did not undergo a full brain scan to detect uterine damage, which was never repaired, according to court documents.
They also included what they said was newly revealed evidence, including the 2024 interview with a clinical psychologist in which Bryant described the abuse he suffered from male relatives, his mother, a preacher’s wife, and several strippers in his neighborhood before he became a teenager.
Justices sided with prosecutors who argued that the three murders, another shooting and two robberies, mostly along dirt roads in Sumter County east of Columbia, were not brain-damaged crimes of impulse but methodical and cunning.
Bryant can still ask the governor to commute his death sentence to life in prison, a decision that, if accepted, will be announced minutes before the execution begins. No South Carolina governor has ever granted clemency in the modern era of capital punishment.
Bryant chose to die by shooting himself
Bryant will be the third person executed in South Carolina this year.
The struggle to find the drug for lethal injection led to an unscheduled 13-year hiatus in executions and prompted state lawmakers to adopt a method often associated with mutinies and desertions in the military, as frontier justice in the American Old West or as a tool of terror and political repression in the former Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.
Outside of South Carolina since 1977. only three prisoners in the United States have been executed by firing squad. All were in Utah, most recently Ronnie Lee Gardner in 2010.
Bryant’s execution will be South Carolina’s seventh since 2024. in September of renewed executions. All others opted for the death penalty by lethal injection after the state was able to obtain the drugs it needed because of the secrecy law. The state also has an electric chair.
Bryant will have a hood placed over his head before three volunteers shoot him from 15 feet (4.6 meters).