Columbia, South Carolina — The South Carolina Supreme Court refused to stay to implement The story of a man who murdered three people over the course of five days more than 20 years ago while leaving taunting messages to police in the blood of one of his victims.
Steven Bryant, 44, is scheduled to die at 6 p.m. on Friday, being shot to death in a Columbia prison.
Bryant’s attorneys A Last ditch call It is the argument that the judge who sentenced him to death never considered the extent of the damage to his brain caused by his mother’s alcohol and drug use during pregnancy.
But the South Carolina Supreme Court rejected that appeal late Monday, saying that even if Bryant’s defense had further investigated whether he had fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, it simply would have given a different reason for his problems without changing the outcome of the death sentence.
“In all cases, (Bryant) demonstrated a high level of planning, decision-making and calculation,” the justices wrote in their unanimous decision Monday.
Bryant is to be executed for killing Willard “TJ” Tietjen at his home in October 2004. Investigators said Bryant burned Tietjen’s eyes with cigarettes after shooting him and painted “Catch Me If You Can” and other sarcastic messages on the wall with the victim’s blood.
Prosecutors said He also shot and killed two men he was giving rides to as they got out of his truck to urinate over the course of five days, terrorizing Sumter County.
In what may be their final appeal. Bryant’s lawyers said that while his original defense team said he was stressed in the months leading up to the killings because he couldn’t stop thinking about being sexually abused by relatives as a child, they did not detail how that abuse affected his ability to comply with the law.
Bryant’s lawyers said he did not receive a full brain scan before his 2008 trial, which could have identified intrauterine damage that was never repaired, according to court papers.
It also included what they said was newly discovered evidence, including a 2024 interview with a clinical psychologist, in which Bryant described abuse he suffered from male relatives, his mother, a preacher’s wife and several female strippers in his neighborhood before he became a teenager.
The judges sided with prosecutors who said the three killings, along with another shooting and two robberies along dirt roads in rural Sumter County in eastern Columbia, were not reckless crimes due to brain damage but were systematic and cunning.
Bryant could still ask the governor for that Reducing his death sentence To life imprisonment in a decision that, if made, will not be announced until minutes before the sentence begins. No South Carolina governor has ever done this Grant clemency In the modern era of the death penalty.
Bryant will be the third man to be executed By firing squad In South Carolina this year.
Struggles to find drugs for use in lethal injection led to an unintended 13-year hiatus in executions, and state lawmakers introduced the method often associated with mutiny and desertion, 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, only three other prisoners have been executed by firing squad in the United States since 1977. All of them were in Utah, the most recent being Ronnie Lee Gardner in 2010.
Bryant’s execution will be the seventh in South Carolina since then Executions resumed In September 2024. The others chose execution by lethal injection after the state was able to obtain the necessary medication due to a secrecy law. The state also has an electric chair.
Bryant would be put on a hood before being shot Three volunteers From a distance of 15 feet (4.6 m).