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Harris speaks about abortion in Georgia, highlighting deaths of two Georgia women
Atlanta – Vice President Kamala Harris‘ visit to Georgia Friday is centered around one thing: women’s reproductive rights.
The visit by Harris follows ProPublica’s investigation into two women who recently died in the state. It found their deaths could have been prevented, but their medical care was hindered by Georgia’s six-week abortion ban. Harris highlighted the stories of Candi Miller and Amber Nicole Thurman, the two women at the center of ProPublica’s report, and argued cases like theirs would intensify if former President Donald Trump is reelected.
Thurman’s family met with Harris at her “Unite for America” rally Thursday with Oprah Winfrey in Michigan. On Friday, Harris talked about her conversation with Thurman’s mother and sisters. She said they told her about “how terribly they miss her.”
“Their pain is heartbreaking,” Harris said. She added that Thurman’s mother said that she “can’t stop thinking” about the word “preventable” because “medical experts have now determined that Amber’s death was preventable.”
According to ProPublica, Thurman, who was pregnant, took abortion pills, but did not expel all of the fetal tissue from her body, a rare complication. She needed a routine dilation and curettage to remove the tissue, but the procedure was now a felony in Georgia. A doctor who performed the procedure could be prosecuted and sentenced to prison. ProPublica reported that doctors monitored “her infection spreading, her blood pressure sinking and her organs beginning to fail.” By the time they operated, it was too late.
Harris also said she promised Thurman’s mother she’d make sure her daughter is not remembered “just as a statistic.”
In Michigan Thursday, Harris reminded voters that “Trump chose three members of the United States Supreme Court with the intention that they would [undo] the protections of Roe v Wade, and they did as he intended.”
Anti-abortion rights group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America accused Harris of attempting to use these stories to “score political points.”
“We mourn the senseless loss of Amber, Candi, and their unborn children. We agree their deaths were preventable. But let’s be absolutely clear: Georgia’s law and every pro-life state law calls on doctors to act in circumstances just like theirs. If abortion advocates weren’t spreading misinformation and confusion to score political points, it’s possible the outcome would have been different,” said Katie Daniel, the group’s state policy director.
In Atlanta, Harris also called out Trump’s plans to vote as a Florida citizen against a state ballot measure that would protect abortion rights and restore the limits set under Roe v. Wade. Like Georgia, Florida has a six-week abortion ban in place.
“And now, Donald Trump says he will personally cast his vote in Florida, which is where he now lives, to support their extreme abortion ban, just like the one that is here in Georgia,” she said.
Asked about his vote during the September debate between Harris and Trump, Trump falsely claimed Democratic-run states and Harris’ running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, support abortion in the ninth month, and argued there was wide bipartisan support for the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
“[Abortion access is] the vote of the people now. It’s not tied up in the federal government. I did a great service in doing it. It took courage to do it,” he said during the debate. “And the Supreme Court had great courage in doing it. And I give tremendous credit to those six justices.”
One Harris campaign official said its work in Georgia has focused on tying reproductive rights to the state’s Black maternal mortality rate.
Georgia has one of the highest maternal mortality rates for Black women according to the Journal of the American Medical Association. Both Thurman and Miller were black.
This is Harris’ third trip to the state as a presidential candidate, and her eighth this year as vice president, according to a CBS News tracker.
A number of her trips have been focused on women’s reproductive rights. Surrogates for the campaign are currently on a “Reproductive Freedom Tour” that began in Florida and is passing through the swing states. Throughout her vice presidency, Harris has traveled to states that were imposing abortion restrictions or bans, such as Arizona, Indiana and Iowa.
In March, she became the first vice president to visit an abortion provider when she made a trip to a Planned Parenthood clinic in Minnesota.
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South Carolina put inmate Freddie Owens to death Friday as the state restarted executions after an unintended 13-year pause because prison officials couldn’t get the drugs needed for lethal injections.
Owens was convicted of the 1997 killing of a Greenville convenience store clerk during a robbery. While on trial, Owens killed an inmate at a county jail. His confession to that attack was read to two different juries and a judge who all sentenced him to death.
Owens, 46, was pronounced dead at 6:55 p.m.
When the curtain to the death chamber opened, Owens was strapped to a gurney, his arms stretched to his sides.
He mouthed a word to his lawyer, who smiled back. He appeared conscious for about a minute, then his eyes closed and he took several deeps breaths.
His breathing got more shallows and his face twitched for another four or five minutes before the movements stopped.
A medical professional came in and declared him dead about 13 minutes later.
Owens’ last-ditch appeals were repeatedly denied, including by a federal court Friday morning. Owens also petitioned for a stay of execution from the U.S. Supreme Court. South Carolina’s governor and corrections director swiftly filed a reply, stating the high court should reject Owens’ petition. The filing said nothing is exceptional about his case.
The high court denied the request shortly after the scheduled start time of the execution.
His last chance to avoid death was for Republican South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster to commute his sentence to life in prison. McMaster denied Owens’ request as well, stating that he had “carefully reviewed and thoughtfully considered” Owens’ application for clemency.
McMaster said earlier that he would follow historical tradition and announce his decision minutes before the lethal injection begins, when prison officials call him and the state attorney general to make sure there is no reason to delay the execution. The former prosecutor had promised to review Owens’ clemency petition but has said he tends to trust prosecutors and juries.
Owens was convicted of killing Irene Graves in 1999. Prosecutors said he fired a shot into the head of the single mother of three who worked three jobs when she said she couldn’t open the store’s safe.
But hanging over his case is another killing: After his conviction, but before he was sentenced in Graves’ killing, Owens fatally attacked a fellow jail inmate, Christopher Lee.
Owens gave a detailed confession about how he stabbed Lee, burned his eyes, choked and stomped him, ending by saying he did it “because I was wrongly convicted of murder,” according to the written account of an investigator.
That confession was read to each jury and judge who went on to sentence Owens to death. Owens had two different death sentences overturned on appeal only to end up back on death row.
Owens was charged with murder in Lee’s death but was never tried. Prosecutors dropped the charges with the right to restore them in 2019 around the time Owens ran out of regular appeals.
Owens may be the first of several inmates to die in South Carolina’s death chamber at Broad River Correctional Institution. Five other inmates are out of appeals and the South Carolina Supreme Court has cleared the way to hold an execution every five weeks.
South Carolina first tried to add the firing squad to restart executions after its supply of lethal injection drugs expired and no company was willing to publicly sell them more. But the state had to pass a shield law keeping the drug supplier and much of the protocol for executions secret to be able to reopen the death chamber.
To carry out executions, the state switched from a three-drug method to a new protocol of using just the sedative pentobarbital. The new process is similar to how the federal government kills inmates, according to state prison officials.
South Carolina law allows condemned inmates to choose lethal injection, the new firing squad or the electric chair built in 1912. Owens allowed his lawyer to choose how he died, saying he felt if he made the choice he would be a party to his own death and his religious beliefs denounce suicide.
South Carolina’s last execution was in May 2011. It took a decade of wrangling in the Legislature — first adding the firing squad as a method and later passing a shield law — to get capital punishment restarted.
South Carolina has put 43 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. Only nine states have put more inmates to death.
But since the unintentional execution pause, South Carolina’s death row population has dwindled. The state had 63 condemned inmates in early 2011. It had 32 when Friday started. About 20 inmates have been taken off death row and received different prison sentences after successful appeals. Others have died of natural causes.
In his final appeal, Owens’ lawyers said prosecutors never presented scientific evidence that Owens pulled the trigger when Graves was killed and the chief evidence against him was a co-defendant who pleaded guilty and testified that Owens was the killer.
Owens’ attorneys provided a sworn statement two days before the execution from Steven Golden saying Owens was not in the store, contradicting his trial testimony. Prosecutors said other friends of Owens and his former girlfriend testified that he bragged about killing the clerk.
Owens’ lawyers also said he was just 19 when the killing happened and that he had suffered brain damage from physical and sexual violence while in a juvenile prison.
Volunteers on an archaeological dig in the ruins of an ancient Gaulish village high above the cliffs in northern France this week uncovered a small glass vial —and within it a neatly rolled, 200-year-old message from a colleague from another era.
The note was written by archaeologist P.J Féret, who conducted a dig at the Cité de Limes site in January 1825, the town supporting the dig, Eu, said in a Facebook post.
Féret wrote —perhaps as inspiration to the nascent archaeologists standing in his footsteps nearly two centuries later— that he was a member of several scientific societies and he “continues his research in this entire vast compound.”
Eu
“It was an absolutely magic moment,” Guillaume Blondel, who heads the archaeological service for the town of Eu, told the BBC. “We knew there had been excavations here in the past, but to find this message from 200 years ago… it was a total surprise.”
“Sometimes you see these time capsules left behind by carpenters when they build houses. But it’s very rare in archaeology,” Blondel said. “Most archaeologists prefer to think that there won’t be anyone coming after them because they’ve done all the work!”
Eu
Municipal records confirmed that Féret conducted a first dig at the site 200 years ago.
The oldest message in a bottle ever found was 131 years and 223 days old when it was discovered, Guinness World Records said in a statement. Australians Tonya and Kym Illman found the message on Jan. 21, 2018, at Wedge Island, Australia.
A German ship captain threw a gin bottle overboard on June 12, 1886, Guinness World Records said, with a message written in ink, that contained the ship’s coordinates and details, including departure and arrival times. The note, from the Deutsche Seewarte in Hamburg, requested the finder deliver the note to the nearest German Embassy.
If authenticated, Féret’s 200-year-old message in a bottle will be the oldest ever found.
