SC killer who strangled mom in front of daughter, dies by lethal injection

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Shortly after 6 p.m. on Friday, double-murderer Stephen Stanko was executed by lethal injection inside of the state death chamber at the Broad River Correctional Institution in Columbia, South Carolina.
His execution took place amid renewed scrutiny on the procedures for South Carolina's lethal injection and firing squad. Attorneys allege that only two of three bullets hit Mikal Mahdi, the last man to be executed, not fully destroying his heart. While state officials deny this was the case, Stanko said he was forced to choose lethal injection. Prison officials only this week revealed that it is performed with two doses of the sedative pentobarbital.
Stanko received a rare double death sentence in two separate trials in Georgetown and Horry counties. The first for the murder of his girlfriend, librarian Laura Ling, who he strangled to death in front of her 15-year-old daughter and another for the murder of his friend, Henry Turner.
In attendance at the execution were two members of Turner's family, a member of the Ling family, an agent of South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, a representative of the 15th Circuit Solicitor's office, one of Stanko's attorneys, Lindsey Vann, the corrections department communications director Chrysti Shain and three media witnesses.
The family members appeared stoic as Vann read Stanko's three and a half minute long final statement where he apologized to the victims and his family. Stanko described many of the things he had accomplished before his life turned to crime: being an honor student and an athlete, leading school clubs, excelling at math, volunteering at an orphanage and saving a child from drowning in Augusta, Georgia.
'None of this is meant to brag. It is only meant to show that I am not only what people see me as now — in this moment,' Vann read on Stanko's behalf. 'We execute people in this country for moments in their lives ... I have lived approximately twenty thousand nine hundred and seventy-three days but I am judged solely for one.'
Stanko, already a convicted felon, committed the two murders during a 24-hour crime spree, which prosecutors say came as a series of cons he was running were on the verge of being exposed. He was also convicted of the rape of Ling's daughter, who he made watch him strangle Ling, as well as armed robbery for the thefts of Ling and Turner's cars and bank cards.
After his statement was read, tears appeared to fall down Stanko's cheeks and he appeared to mouth 'thank you,' at Vann, said Tommy Cardinal with My Horry News, one of the media witnesses.
The execution began at 6:06 p.m. after all final appeals were rejected and South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster, a supporter of the death penalty, denied Stanko's clemency petition.
As a female voice announced over loudspeaker that the first dose of pentobarbital was being injected, Stanko, who was wearing glasses, appeared to glance at the his family members, and those of his victims.
Almost immediately, color seemed to drain from Stanko's face and hands, reported Loren Korn of television station WMBF, one of the media witnesses.
His mouth appeared to move but it was impossible to make out the words, said Jeffrey Collins, a reporter with the Associated Press who was witnessing his 13th execution.
Stanko took a few deep breaths and then his lips fluttered with several small puffing breaths. His breathing appeared to stop after a minute, the media witnesses reported.
At 6:20, the female voice announced that a second dose of pentobarbital was being administered. It is first time that the department of corrections has made such an announcement, which Shain said was in an attempt to be 'as transparent as possible.'
He was pronounced dead at 6:34 p.m., the witnesses said.
Stanko's final meal was fried fish, fried shrimp, crab cakes, a baked potato, carrots, okra, cherry pie, banana pudding and sweet tea.
'If my execution helps with closure and/or the grieving process, may they all move forward with that being completed,' Stanko's final message read.
His teachers in Goose Creek remembered him as a bright child and good student. But brain injuries were a fact of his life, the first occurring during his birth. He sustained multiple head injuries playing sports and one while defending a classmate from a brutal physical attack.
Multiple experts at his first trail testified that Stanko was a 'genius,' according to court filings. But the injuries left him with serious damage to his left frontal lobe, part of the brain that regulates emotions. As a result, he had a psychopathic disregard for morality. He could seem calm and collected one moment before suddenly snapping, flying into a violent rage the next, experts testified at the sentencing phase of his murder trials.
He was previously sentenced to prison for kidnapping after he assaulted and tied up a girlfriend, gagging her with a bleach soaked rag in 1996.
While serving that sentence, Stanko appeared to do well with the structure of prison. He wrote measured letters to The State newspaper arguing for sentencing reform, and he co-authored a book, 'Living in Prison: A History of the Correctional System,' with two professors.
After serving eight years of a ten-year sentence, Stanko was released and moved to the Grand Strand. He met Ling, 41, and later the 74-year-old Turner, who attended a computer class that Ling taught. But Stanko struggled to find his footing.
He moved in with Ling in Murrells Inlet and wanted to write another book about his prison experience. But he struggled to hold down a job and allegedly ran a number of scams around the Myrtle Beach area from the libarby where Ling worked. He would claim to be a paralegal, lawyer or investigator who could help people get access to money, according to court filings.
On the night of April 8, 2005, he attacked Ling and then raped her 15-year-old daughter. Dragging the teen into the room with an injured Ling, he held her down while he strangled her mother with a free hand. He then slashed the teen's throat twice, almost severing one ear. When Stanko fled with Ling's car and a debit card, the teen managed to crawl to a phone to call 911.
Stanko fled to Turner's home, selling Turner a sob story that his father had just died. The next morning, he killed Turner, shooting him through a pillow pressed up against his back as the older man stood in front of a mirror. Prosecutors say that Stanko then stole Turner's truck and money, leading police on a multi-day manhunt through the Southeast. After stopping at the Blue Marlin restaurant in Columbia, Stanko was ultimately arrested at an Augusta mall following a tip from a woman who recognized him at a bar.
His attorneys said that he was 'insane' at the time of the killings. That argument did not move jurors, who sentenced him to death for the murder of Ling in 2006 and again for Turner's murder in 2009.
In the weeks before his death, Stanko and his attorneys launched the most comprehensive constitutional challenge yet to the state's death penalty laws.
Stanko's attorneys say that he was forced to chose lethal injection in order to save himself from an excruciating death on the electric chair, South Carolina's default method of execution. Stanko would have chosen to be executed by firing squad, his attorneys say, but he feared extreme pain and suffering following the execution of Mikal Mahdi.
Mahdi was shot by a firing squad April 11, but he appeared to continue breathing for 80 seconds after he was shot. An autopsy found only two bullet entry wounds in Mahdi's body even though the firing squad had three gunmen. Attorneys for the state and the Department of Corrections maintain that all three guns were fired and that two bullets must have entered at the same spot on Mahdi's skin and traveled along the same path.
Left only with lethal injection, Stanko's attorneys raised concerns that there were problems with this execution method because autopsies had indicated that two other condemned men were given a total of 10 grams each of pentobarbital.
In public statements and in court filings, the corrections department had indicated that their policy was to administer just one five gram dose. Autopsies have also indicated that the men suffer from a pulmonary edema, a condition where the lungs fill with fluid leading to a painful death where the condemned feel like they're drowing.
But during an emergency federal court hearing on Wednesday, June 11, lawyers for the corrections department stated, for the first time, that the department's policy is to inject a second 5 gram dose of pentobarbital if any electrical activity is still detected in the heart after ten minutes.
The department's execution protocols remain hotly contested. South Carolina law prohibits the disclosure of almost any information about the execution process. As a result, lawyers for men on death row say they do not have enough information to evaluate whether the state's executions are cruel and unusual.
Outside the prison gates, protesters held a vigil opposing Stanko's execution.
Andrew Voyles drove to Columbia from Charlotte, North Carolina, to attend his first protest against the death penalty. He previously supported the practice.
'The death penalty is something that I used to be in favor of, but as I've come more into my faith as a Christian, as I lean more into my identity as a conservative, I've realized that those two parts of myself that I hold very important are diametrically opposed to the death penalty,' Voyles said.
Additional reporting contributed by Colin Elam.