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By Khaleda Rahman
National Correspondent
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Florida is set to execute a man sentenced to death for the murders of a teenage girl and another woman in separate attacks in 1984.
Duane Eugene Owen, 62, is scheduled to die by lethal injection at 6 p.m. on Thursday.
Owen broke into a home in Delray Beach on March 24, 1984, and attacked 14-year-old Karen Slattery, who was babysitting two young children. According to court records, Owen repeatedly stabbed Slattery and then sexually assaulted her. The children were not injured.
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Then in May that year, Owen murdered Georgianna Worden, 38. She had been sleeping when he broke into her Boca Raton home and struck her in the head with a hammer multiple times before raping her, authorities said.
According to court records, he also attacked other women in their homes in Palm Beach County in the 1980s.
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Slattery's sister, Debbi Johnson, has said she is glad that Owen will soon be put to death. She was 10 when her sister was murdered.
"I don't think there's anything that I could say or he could say that would make a difference," she told the South Florida Sun Sentinel. "I don't forgive him. At all."
Owen's attorney has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to halt Thursday's execution, arguing that Owen is not competent to be executed. It came after previous efforts to halt the execution on those grounds in Florida courts failed.
He "lacks a rational understanding of the connection between his crime and impending execution due to his fixed psychotic delusions and dementia," Lisa M. Fusaro argued in the filing.
Fusaro said state courts "placed undue emphasis on Owen's past competency and mental illness instead of solely focusing on his present mental condition."
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis temporarily stayed Owen's execution date in May and appointed a commission of experts to evaluate his competency. He later dissolved the stay, saying the psychiatrists had concluded that Owen "has the mental capacity to understand the nature of the death penalty and the reasons why it is to be imposed upon him."
Owen's attorney argued that state courts put the credibility of the commission who "saw Owen for approximately 100 minutes and administered no testing" above a neuropsychologist retained by the defense who evaluated and tested him for over 13 hours.
In a response to the filing, Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody urged the high court to allow the execution to proceed.
"This continued recycling of the same suspect and incredible facts to support a stay would be a gross miscarriage of justice and would amount to a commutation of his death sentences for the duration of the stay," Moody wrote. "Owen is not entitled to any further review."
Newsweek has contacted Owen's attorney and the Florida Attorney General's office for further comment via email.
Owen's execution is the fourth scheduled in Florida this year. Donald Dillbeck was executed in February, Louis Gaskin was executed in April and Darryl Back was executed last month.
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