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Authors: Michael Benson

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Reinforcing Connie Price’s charges that no one was focusing on the defendant’s growing menace was the testimony of former assistant solicitor Karen Sauls. After a rundown of who she was—poli-sci degree from North Carolina State University in 1997, law degree from Saint Louis University in 1992, now assistant district solicitor—she testified that assistant solicitors were not intended to be investigators. If Connie Price had a complaint about Stephen Stanko, the police were the people she needed to contact.
U.S. Marshal Thedus Mayo testified that she had contacted Pam Harrelson at the parole board regarding complaints about Stanko. Harrelson told her that warrants were typically issued only when there were serious breaches of parole conditions, such as when parolees absconded. Stanko’s failure to report, Harrelson told Mayo, was merely a “technical violation.”
During the conference to determine the appropriate jury charges for the penalty phase, Judge Jefferson informed both sides that she intended to charge the jury on two statutory mitigating factors. William Diggs did not request a charge on any additional mitigating factors—in particular a consideration of “the age or mentality of the defendant at the time of the crime”—and told Judge Jefferson that he had no objection to the jury charges.
Diggs argued before the jury one last time, trying to save his client’s life. He repeated his earlier statement that institutionalization often had a positive effect on psychopaths. The last time Stephen Stanko was in prison, he had written a book. He could be a leader in prison. “Stephen could be a good inmate. With his intelligence, he could help other inmates.”
On Friday, August 18, 2006, after another two hours of deliberation, the jury gave word that they were through. Judge Deadra Jefferson called them into the courtroom and they took their positions in the jury box.
“Has the jury reached a decision?” Judge Jefferson asked.
“We have, Your Honor,” the forewoman said.
“The defendant will, please, stand for the publication of the jury’s verdict,” the judge instructed.
Stanko rose to his feet.
The forewoman said, “
The State of South Carolina, Georgetown County,
versus
Stephen Christopher Stanko,
recommendation of sentence, death penalty.”
Judge Jefferson took the jury’s recommendation and sentenced Stephen Stanko to death. The judge also sentenced Stanko to 110 years in prison on the other charges, including criminal sexual conduct, kidnapping, and armed robbery.
Stanko was deadpan.
William Diggs asked the court to set aside the verdict and allow Stanko to be tested further for his condition, adding, “It’s beyond a doubt that Mr. Stanko has this particular brain defect. It would be fundamentally unfair to go ahead with his execution.”
Judge Jefferson explained that the prosecution in this case, as well as the court, agreed from the start of proceedings that Stanko’s mental state was a question of fact for the jury. There had been plenty of time for tests, tests, and more tests.
“It really came down to who the jury believed,” the judge added. “Did they believe the state’s experts, or the defense’s experts? There is no need for any more testing of Mr. Stanko.” The defense case had demonstrated that Stanko already had been examined by a slew of physicians and scientists. “I can’t imagine anyone else who would test him,” the judge concluded.
Stephen Stanko’s execution was originally scheduled for October 17, 2007, but that date would be set aside because of Stanko’s appeals process, and the fact that he still faced trial for the murder of Henry Lee Turner.
Gregory Hembree, glowing with his victory, fielded questions from reporters, saying he felt the death penalty was the appropriate sentence in this case. “I wouldn’t have sought it if we didn’t believe in it,” the solicitor said.
Asked how long he felt Stanko had to live, he said it would be for quite a while. Appeals could take years. “Typically, it lasts between six and eight years,” he added.
No, he didn’t think the jury ever took Stanko’s insanity defense seriously. “He knew what he was doing. He wasn’t just some loony tune who didn’t know what he was doing.”
Also “doing press,” although far more emotionally, was Chris Ling, cheeks wet with tears, telling reporters that he had learned three important lessons during the trial: “Number one, the process works. We’ll be putting down a man who victimized old men and little girls. Number two, our probation system needs a total overhaul. It needs to be totally reviewed. And three, I’ve got the greatest daughter in the world, and I love her. Thank you,” Ling said.
“What was the hardest part for you?” asked Michael Smith, of the
Horry Independent.
“I think that came on the first day of the trial. To see him uncuffed and wearing street clothes. It was hard for me to not get closer and closer to him,” Ling replied.
About half of the jurors made themselves available for interview after the penalty phase. They were all not only at ease with their decision, but enthusiastic about it. The man was guilty and he deserved execution. None of them would lose sleep over it.
Did they buy into the defense’s medical witnesses at all? No way. One male juror explained what it was like to hear the defense’s scientific theories. He felt “dazzled with brilliance, and baffled with bs.” A female juror said she felt it was possible for a man to do these heinous things and
not
be insane. Another male juror characterized Stanko as “worse than a monster,” a guy who “had everyone conned.” What about the testimony that he’d had brain damage from the time he was a baby? They didn’t believe a word of it. “He was temporarily insane when he wanted to be temporarily insane” was how one put it.
The jurors agreed that the witness who most influenced them was Penny Ling. The teenager’s words were something they never would be able to forget. She communicated how brutal, vile, and disgusting the attack had been. One male juror said that listening to the 911 tape was one of the hardest things he’d ever done. The little girl calling for her mommy. It brought tears to his eyes. A female juror noted that even though Laura Ling had not been around to testify, they felt like she was. Dr. Collins’s testimony, and her drawn diagram of Laura Ling—with all of the wounds clearly marked—made it seem as if the victim was testifying from the grave, telling the jurors what a monster Stanko was.
Anyone who was used to watching murder trials on TV, such as trials involving celebrities in California, might have expected to see Stephen Stanko’s trial go on for many weeks, if not months.
But that was not the way things were done in South Carolina.
“I’ve never seen a quicker slam-bang job in my entire life,” recalled Dr. Gordon Crews, who was there for all of it. “One week,
boom,
guilty. One week,
boom,
death. Over. That’s South Carolina justice, man. It was cold and quick.”
Just the way the taxpayers like it.
Outside the courtroom, a reporter found Laura Ling’s mother, Sue Hudson, who was in town from Garland, Texas, to see justice done. Asked what she thought of the sentencing, Hudson said she was “tickled to death” that Stephen Stanko was getting the death penalty.
APPEAL
Up until the late 1900s, South Carolina executions were carried out by the same staff that manned death row, forcing state executioners to kill men they had grown to know. In the modern system, separate staffs tended to the prisoners and executed them, and there were fewer debilitating cases of depression to worry about.
From 1912 to 1990, South Carolina’s death row was at the Central Correctional Institution in Columbia. From 1990 to 1997, it was at the Broad River Correctional Institution, before moving to its current location.
Following his sentencing, Stephen Stanko was sent to live on death row in the Lieber Correctional Institution in Ridgeville.
Executions were carried out at the Broad River Capital Punishment Facility, the state’s only death house. Since 1912, South Carolina had executed prisoners in the electric chair. A fourteen-year-old black male once took the long walk—but that was ancient history now.
Prisoners on death row for crimes committed before 1995 had a choice: the electric chair or lethal injection? If they refused to pick, they got the chair. The last prisoner to go out crackling and smoking died in 2008.
Criminals whose crimes came after 1995 received the lethal injection, which was administered in the same area as the electric chair. Even those who got the shot saw “Ol’ Sparky,” looking like a terrifying Grand Guignol set piece, just before they died.
Three members of the media would be allowed to witness Stanko’s death—one print, one electronic, one wire service. Three members of the victim’s family could be there.
Also allowed to watch Stanko die would be a man or woman of the cloth, a lawyer representing the rights of the prisoner, and Gregory Hembree, the solicitor who earned Stanko’s conviction.
Perhaps it was a good thing that an obligatory marathon of legal activity preceded an execution. DNA testing proved that sometimes the system got it wrong.
Executions now occurred in South Carolina between once and three times a year. So it was par for the course that Stanko didn’t figure to die any day soon. Before South Carolina could make plans to off him, there was a plethora of legal business to tend to, most of it in Horry County where Stanko’s responsibility for the Turner murder remained unresolved.
At the end of the summer of 2007, Stephen Stanko had his first appellate hearing in a Columbia, South Carolina, courtroom. His appellate attorneys were Kathrine Haggard Hudgins and Joseph L. Savitz III, both assistant appellate defenders for the South Carolina Commission on Indigent Defense.
Savitz—B.A. in English from Clemson, 1977, J.D. from the University of South Carolina School of Law— had been one of the defenders since 1982, and he specialized in death penalty cases. Hudgins, who went to the same law school, earned her B.A. at the College of Charleston. Hudgins proved to be a woman who, when given a choice, always chose both. She had a bundle of experience working both sides, as both an assistant solicitor and as a public defender. She also had a private practice that handled crime cases, both state and federal, and at both the trial and appellate level. Into journalism, too, she served on the criminal law committee, and the editorial board for the renowned
South Carolina Lawyer
magazine.
In March of 2008, Savitz and Hudgins argued that Stephen Stanko didn’t get a fair trial because, during voir dire, the judge wouldn’t allow potential jurors their opinion on the insanity defense, and she had failed to instruct the jury on an additional and unrequested statutory mitigating circumstance during the penalty phase. Regarding voir dire, the supreme court noted that when Judge Deadra Jefferson refused to allow William Diggs to question potential jurors regarding their feelings specifically on the insanity defense, Diggs had stated for the record that he was “abandoning” that line of questioning. Therefore, no issue was preserved for appellate review, since the objecting party accepted the court’s ruling and did not contemporaneously make an additional objection. In order for Judge Jefferson’s ruling during voir dire to constitute a reversible error, the limitation she placed on questioning must have rendered the trial fundamentally unfair, and that was not the case. In fact, the court characterized the voir dire as impartial and unbiased.
The supreme court voted four-to-one in favor of denying the new trial. Chief Justice Jean Hoefer Toal wrote that the jury process was fair because
the qualified jurors were impartial, unbiased and capable of following the law.
There was no indication that the trial had been rendered fundamentally unfair by the court’s limitations on voir dire. The lone dissenting vote came from Justice Costa Pleicones, who maintained that Stanko’s attorneys should have been able to “probe jurors’ bias” with respect to the insanity defense.
Disappointed, Savitz said he would appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, adding, “People that don’t think insanity is a defense aren’t qualified to sit on the jury. We don’t know if we got twelve jurors who just don’t think insanity is a defense, thought he was insane but thought that was all the more reason to give him the death penalty.”
Connie Price, the woman who tried to report Stephen Stanko to the authorities just days before the murders, was contacted not long after the trial by Los Angeles television producer and author Larry Garrison, president of SilverCreek Entertainment.
Garrison told her he wanted to write a book and produce a feature film on how she “eluded” Stanko and later testified against him.
When Kelly Marshall Fuller, of the Myrtle Beach
Sun News,
contacted Garrison, he admitted that he had books and feature films in the works on a number of subjects, including Michael Jackson (who was alive then) and the L.A. murder of Bonny Lee Bakley.
Stephen Stanko was noteworthy enough for CBS to dedicate an entire episode (January 13, 2007) of its
48 Hours
program to him. Troy Roberts, a network investigator, spent days interviewing Stanko, trying to find out what made him tick. Stanko made a very strong first impression on Roberts. He had manners, looks, and smarts. It didn’t seem at first to Roberts that Stanko was capable of depraved deeds. And that was what made the story so compelling.
One of the key witnesses interviewed by CBS was Dr. Thomas Sachy, who explained that he “took on” the Stephen Stanko case because from all of the things he’d read in the literature—in the news articles regarding his capture and what he had done—Stanko was probably a psychopath. He described PET technology and how cool and shriveled Stanko’s frontal lobes were.
In response, Gregory Hembree was concise. “Junk science,” he said.
Not all of the trial’s participants watched the
48 Hours
episode on Stanko, and some skipped it even during an encore appearance. “I have had three or four people tell me they saw me on the
48 Hours
episode, but I missed it both times,” Kelly Crolley said.
On Friday, March 16, 2007, Stephen Stanko’s mother, Joan, passed away at the age of seventy-two in Summerville Medical Center.
Two and a half months later, Penny Ling, now seventeen, graduated with honors from Dutch Fork High School, home of the Silver Foxes, in Irmo, South Carolina. The Associated Press covered the event, and Penny repeated for them that she didn’t mind being identified in the media. She hoped her openness and her story would help other assault victims.
She said, “If there’s anything I can do to show anyone who’s ever been the victim of domestic violence, or who’s been through something similar, that you can piece your life together, even at fifteen. You can make something out of this.”
Asked her plans, Penny said she was attending a nearby university that autumn. She said that every day she lived, every success she enjoyed, every accomplishment she achieved, was not just a reminder of her strength, but also a reminder of Stephen Stanko’s weakness.
She smiled as she told the reporter she was a living example that he “failed at one of the last things he’ll ever do.”
In the days and weeks following Stanko’s death sentence, Penny said, she closed the door on that chapter of her life. The day she walked out of that courtroom, after testifying, was the day he died as far as she was concerned.
“It’s done,” she said. “Even though he took my mom away, I’m probably the best representation of who my mom was. So in a way, she’s still here.”

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