In a recent decision, South Carolina’s Supreme Court has declined to halt the execution of Stephen Bryant, who was convicted of killing three individuals over a span of five days more than two decades ago. During his crime spree, Bryant left messages taunting the police, written in the blood of one of his victims.

Stephen Bryant, now 44, faces execution by firing squad, scheduled for 6 p.m. this Friday at a Columbia state prison.

Bryant’s legal team made a last-minute appeal, arguing that the sentencing judge was not informed about the severe brain damage Bryant suffered due to his mother’s substance abuse during pregnancy.

Court’s decision was unanimous

However, the South Carolina Supreme Court dismissed this appeal on Monday. The court noted that even if Bryant’s defense had investigated the possibility of Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder, it would have offered an alternative explanation for his behavior but would not have altered the death sentence.

“By any measure, Bryant demonstrated a high level of planning, decision-making, and calculation,” the justices stated in their unanimous decision on Monday.

Bryant is being 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 “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 as they stepped out of his truck to urinate over five days that terrorized Sumter County.

Appeal detailed abuse and Bryant’s mother drinking while pregnant

In what may be their final appeal, Bryant’s lawyers said that although his original defense team had noted that 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 that abuse 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 included what they said was newly uncovered evidence including a 2024 interview with a clinical psychologist where 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.

The justices sided with prosecutors who said the three killings, along with another shooting and two burglaries mostly along dirt roads in the rural Sumter County east of Columbia weren’t impulsive crimes from a damaged brain but were methodical and cunning.

Bryant can still 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 has chosen to die by firing squad

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 prompted 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.