Kandee Martin was shot once in the chest and once in the head on a dark country road, five days before her son's second birthday.

South Carolina is preparing to execute the third inmate to be put to death since September as the state goes through a backlog of prisoners who exhausted their appeals while the state couldn’t find lethal injection drugs.

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.