Lawyers for Stephen Bryant make final appeal over brain damage to stop South Carolina execution

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COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — Lawyers for a man on South Carolina's death row are trying to stop his execution later this month by arguing the judge who sentenced him to die never got to consider how badly his brain was damaged from his mother's alcohol and drug use while pregnant.

Stephen Bryant, 44, is being put to death 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 “catch me if u can” and other taunting messages on the wall with the victim’s blood. Prosecutors said he also shot and killed two men he was giving rides to over five days that terrorized Sumter County in October 2004.

Attorneys for the state argue that the three killings, along with another shooting and two burglaries mostly along dirt roads in the rural county east of Columbia weren’t impulsive crimes from a damaged brain but were methodical and cunning.

But Bryant’s lawyers are arguing in a final appeal to the state Supreme Court that while his original defense team said he was unnerved in the months before the killings because he couldn’t stop thinking about being sexually abused by relatives as a child, they didn’t detail how Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder had affected his ability to conform to the law.

Bryant's lawyers said he didn't get a full brain scan before his 2008 trial that could have identified in-utero damage that was never repaired, according to court papers.

They also submitted a 2024 interview with a clinical psychologist wherein Bryant described 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 pushed back, saying Bryant's attorneys shouldn't be allowed to make a different case to keep him from being put to death after the first one failed.

They argue that the number of crimes, their planning and Bryant’s lingering Tietjen’s home to desecrate his body, as well as taunting Tietjen’s wife and daughter over the phone, were deliberate acts of evil — not impulses from a broken brain.

“Bryant was methodical, cunning, and took pleasure in deadly rampage including the gratuitous infliction of horror on Mr. Tietjen’s family,” they wrote in court papers.

They said the only way the legal system could fail is to delay his Nov. 14 execution by firing squad.

Beyond the appeal, Bryant can also ask the governor to reduce his death sentence to life in prison in a decision that, if made, won't be announced until minutes before the execution is set to start. No South Carolina governor has ever granted clemency in the modern era of the death penalty.

Bryant will be the third man executed by firing squad in South Carolina this year.

Struggles to find drugs to use for lethal injection led to an unintended 13-year pause in executions and state lawmakers to introduce the method that's often associated with mutinies and desertion in armies, as frontier justice in America’s 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 in the U.S. have been executed by firing squad since 1977. All were in Utah, most recently Ronnie Lee Gardner in 2010.

Bryant’s execution will be the seventh in South Carolina since executions restarted in September 2024. All the others have chosen execution by lethal injection after the state was able to obtain the drug needed because of a secrecy law. The state also has an electric chair.

Bryant will have a hood placed on his head before he is shot by three volunteers from 15 feet (4.6 meters) away.