A South Carolina man sent to death row twice for separate murders is scheduled to die Friday by lethal injection in the state’s sixth execution in nine months.
Stephen Stanko, 57, is being killed for shooting a friend and then cleaning out his bank account in Horry County in 2005. Hours earlier Stanko killed his live-in girlfriend, strangling her as he raped her teenage daughter in the woman’s home in neighboring Georgetown County. He slit the teen’s throat but she survived. Stanko also ended up on death row for that crime.
Stanko was leaning toward dying by South Carolina’s new firing squad, like two inmates before him. But after autopsy results from the last inmate killed by that method showed the bullets from the three volunteers nearly missed his heart, Stanko went with lethal injection…