From police officer to condemned man

COLUMBIA - Jerry McWee, the Aiken County inmate scheduled to die today by lethal injection, is no stranger to the other side of the law.

More than a decade before he killed two people in 1991, McWee was a police officer in Augusta, Ga., for a couple of years.

And since then, he's apparently stayed out of trouble, committing just one minor infraction in 10 years on death row, his lawyers say.

But prosecutor Barbara Morgan says any good McWee might have done in his life was destroyed by what he did at a rural convenience store in July 1991.

"He literally took this man who had just moved here to get away from crime. And as he was asking for his life, took him to the back and shot him in the back of the head," Morgan said.

McWee shot John Perry twice before taking $350 from the cash register, authorities said.

And he likely will die for that murder at 6 p.m. today at the Capital Punishment Facility at Broad River Correctional Institution. McWee lost his final chance to avoid a death sentence Thursday afternoon, when Gov. Mark Sanford denied his petition for clemency.

McWee asked to have his sentenced reduced to life in prison without parole because his co-defendant in the Perry killing and a second fatal shooting a week later struck a plea bargain that gave him a life sentence.

"The governor found no reason in this case to effectively overturn the results of an exhaustive judicial process," Sanford's spokesman Will Folks said in a statement.

No governor has reduced a death sentence to life in prison in South Carolina since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976.

McWee also lost an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court earlier in the week. Those were his last two chances to save his life, his lawyer John Hardaway has said.

McWee will be the 30th inmate executed in South Carolina since 1976.