After the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the final appeal of a South Carolina inmate, he decided not to ask the governor for clemency, saying he didn't want to spend the rest of his life in prison for a murder he has always insisted he did not commit.

South Carolina has put 45 inmates to death since the death penalty was restarted in the U.S. in 1976. In the early 2000s, it was carrying out an average of three executions a year. Nine states have put more inmates to death.

South Carolina put a third inmate to death in four months Friday as it goes through a backlog of prisoners who exhausted their appeals while the state couldn’t find lethal injection drugs. Marion Bowman Jr.