South Carolina schedules cop killer to die by lethal injection on December 1

Cop killer Bobby Wayne Stone will be the first death row inmate executed in South Carolina since 2011. The state has scheduled his death with the date for December 1, the Island Packet reported. The state’s Supreme Court set the date and notified the Department of Corrections. Unless the 52-year-old murderer opts for electrocution, his capital punishment will be delivered by lethal injection, according to the Bluefield Daily Telegraph.

In 1996, Stone killed Sumter County Sheriff’s Office Sergeant Charlie Kubala. Though Stone admitted to shooting the officer, he asserted that it was accidental. When he was sentenced to die in 1997, he was convicted of first-degree burglary and murder. For the last 20 years, the cop killer has been on death row.

Sheriff’s officer killed responding to call, died at scene

Based on records from the state’s Supreme Court, the Packet reported that Sergeant Kubala responded to a call from a woman after she heard shots in her backyard. She called a neighbor, who went to the woman’s home and, then, police were called.

Stone was reportedly “wandering the woods around the woman’s home,” the Packet noted. He had also been drinking and fired some shots from a couple of guns he recently bought. He left after having been asked to do so earlier when he “approached” the woman’s house after police had been called.

Two calls were made to police. Kubala was the responding officer each time. When he returned to the home after the second call, he went to the side of the woman’s house. Stone was on a porch at the side of her home. He was holding a pistol as he banged on her door. The woman was inside with the neighbor she had called. After the neighbor heard either halt or hold it being yelled by someone outside, both women heard gunshots.

Kubala, a husband, and father, was shot once in the ear and once in the neck by Stone, who investigators described in 2005 as a burglar. Kubala died at the scene of the fatal shooting. Captain Gene Hobbs informed Kubula’s wife of her husband’s death. He said doing so was “literally the hardest thing” he had ever done in his life, WIS TV reported.

Convicted killer given death sentence twice

After Stone received the death penalty in 1997, his sentence was reversed in 2002. After a five-day sentencing hearing in 2002, he received the death penalty a second time following jury deliberations, which lasted nearly four hours. His 2002 sentencing hearing resulted when the state’s Supreme Court determined that the 1997 jury should have been informed that a life sentence equated with no possibility of parole.

Following the 2002 sentencing, then Sumter Sherriff Tommy Mims stated that it was worse to recount events the second time, recalling when he talked with Kubala’s family the night of the shooting and his death, WIS relayed. “He was a very well respected officer,” according to Sheriff Anthony Dennis. “He left a hole in the department when he left.”

If Stone does not request death by electrocution, the state will administer a three-drug death cocktail to carry out his capital punishment. March 29 marked Stone’s latest appeal, which the South Carolina Supreme Court rejected.