OAN Staff Abril Elfi
10:40 AM – Saturday, June 14, 2025
A South Carolina man has been put to death after being sent to death row twice for two separate murders.
On Friday, Stephen Stanko, 57, was pronounced dead at 6:34 p.m. after being put to death by lethal injection.
The execution began after Stanko made an over 3 minute farewell address in which he apologized to his victims and requested not to be judged by the worst day of his life.
“I have lived for approximately 20,973 days, but I am judged solely for one,” Stanko said in his final statement read by his lawyer.
Stanko apologized several times to his victims and their families.
“Once I am gone, I hope that Christina, Laura’s family and Henry’s family can all forgive me. The execution may help them. Forgiveness will heal them.”
Stanko was executed for shooting a friend and then emptying his bank account in Horry County in 2005.
He was also serving a death sentence for slaying his live-in partner in her Georgetown County home hours before raping her adolescent daughter. Stanko slit the teenager’s throat, but she lived.
Stanko is the sixth inmate executed in South Carolina in the past nine months, after the state went 13 years without putting an inmate to death due to a lack of lethal injection medications.
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Correction: “In 2005, he was executed,” was changed to “Stanko was executed for shooting a friend and then emptying his bank account in Horry County in 2005.”