Columbia, South Carolina — Lawyers for a man on death row in South Carolina are trying to stop Execute him Later that month, arguing with the judge who sentenced him to death, he never thought about how much damage to his brain was caused by his mother’s alcohol and drug use during pregnancy.
Steven Bryant, 44, was executed for killing Willard “TJ” Tietjen in his home in October 2004. Investigators said Bryant burned Tietjen’s eyes with cigarettes after shooting him and painted the phrase “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 riding with for more than five days terrorizing Sumter County in October 2004.
State attorneys say the three killings, along with another shooting and two robberies along dirt roads in the rural county east of Columbia, were not reckless crimes due to brain damage but were methodical and cunning.
But Bryant’s lawyers argue in a final appeal to the state Supreme Court that while his original defense team said he was stressed in the months before the killings because he couldn’t stop thinking about being sexually abused by relatives as a child, they did not detail how fetal alcohol spectrum disorder 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.
They also presented a 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.
Prosecutors have countered that Bryant’s attorneys should not be allowed to file a different case to prevent him from being executed after the first case failed.
They argue that the number and planning of the crimes and Bryant’s stay at Tietjen’s home to desecrate his body, as well as the taunts of Tietjen’s wife and daughter over the phone, were deliberate acts of evil — not impulses from a broken brain.
“Bryant was methodical and cunning and enjoyed deadly rampages including inflicting unprovoked terror on Mr. Tietjen’s family,” they wrote in court papers.
They said the only way the legal system could fail was to postpone his execution by firing squad on November 14.
In addition to the appeal, Bryant can also ask the governor 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 will have a hood placed over his head before he is shot Three volunteers From a distance of 15 feet (4.6 m).