On the morning of December 8, 2005, Charles “Chuck” Douglas Martin, a 26-year-old male originally from Tennessee, was just weeks away from freedom. He was serving a five-year sentence for assault and trespassing at the Perry Correctional Institution in Pelzer, South Carolina, and his parole was scheduled to be just three weeks later. Instead of a release, that day brought a violent and tragic end to his life at the hands of his own cellmate, a man already convicted of a double murder.
The man who shared Cell Block A-2 with Charles was Jeffrey Brian Motts, a serial killer serving two life sentences. The two inmates had a history of conflict, reportedly stemming from a dispute over a stolen radio and a shank found in another inmate's cell. Both Martin and Motts had asked prison officials to be separated, with Martin expressing fear for his life and Motts allegedly telling a lieutenant he would kill Martin if they weren't moved. Their requests went unheeded, and in November 2005, they were placed in the same cell.
In the early hours of December 8, an argument erupted between them. Motts, then 30, flew into a rage, knocking Charles unconscious. He then used a torn bedsheet to bind his cellmate's arms and legs. When Charles regained consciousness, he pleaded for his life, but Motts proceeded to strangle him for five minutes, tying the sheet around his neck to finish the act. The Greenville County Coroner's Office would later confirm the cause of death as strangulation.
After the murder, Motts’s actions were chillingly calm. He smoked a cigarette and ate his breakfast. When the cell doors opened, he dragged Charles’s body into a common area of the medium and minimum-security unit. In front of other inmates, he kicked the body and said, "this is what snitches get." Other prisoners alerted a corrections officer, and Motts confessed to the killing just hours later, telling investigators where to find the body. He also reportedly told them to inform prosecutors that a third life sentence would make no difference to him.
Jeffrey Brian Motts was no stranger to homicide. In 1995, at the age of 19, he had murdered his 73-year-old great-aunt, Etta Osteen, and her 79-year-old brother-in-law, Clyde Camby, during a robbery to get money for crack cocaine. He was convicted of those murders in 1997 and sentenced to life in prison. For the murder of Charles Martin, the state of South Carolina sought the death penalty, citing Motts's prior convictions. In December 2007, a jury found him guilty of murder.
Following his conviction, Motts waived all of his appeals and asked to be executed. A court found him mentally competent to make this decision. His family later received an $85,000 settlement from the state of South Carolina in a wrongful death lawsuit, which cited the failure of the Department of Corrections to protect Charles despite the known threats against him.
On May 6, 2011, the day after his 36th birthday, Jeffrey Brian Motts was executed by lethal injection at the Broad River Correctional Institution in Columbia. For his last meal, he ordered pizza, fried fish, popcorn shrimp, and cherry cheesecake. In a final statement read by his lawyer, he wished his mother and grandmother a happy Mother's Day and warned children about the dangers of drugs. "I was the child everyone wanted their children around until I got on drugs," the statement read. "Drugs will destroy your life.” He was the last person to be executed in South Carolina for over a decade.
