The state of South Carolina in US executed a prisoner on Friday evening with a firing squad, an extremely rare method that had not been used in the United States since 2010.
The inmate, Brad Sigmon, 67, was convicted of killing his ex-girlfriend’s parents, David and Gladys Larke, with a baseball bat in 2001.
A judge had ordered Mr. Sigmon to choose from three methods of execution: lethal injection, electrocution or firing squad. His lawyer, Gerald King, said that Mr. Sigmon had chosen to be shot because he had concerns about South Carolina’s lethal injection process.
Mr. Sigmon is the first inmate to be killed in such a manner in the state’s history. Polls show that a majority of Americans favor the death penalty, but many view the firing squad as an archaic form of justice. But as lethal injection drugs have become harder to obtain, and have at times resulted in botched executions, several states have recently legalized firing squads as an execution method.
Utah had previously been the only state to use a firing squad in modern times; it did so in 2010, 1996 and 1977.
Mr. Sigmon was executed in the death chamber at the Broad River Correctional Institution in Columbia, S.C., the state capital.
He was strapped to a metal chair that sits above a catch basin in a corner of the room. The chair was 15 feet from a wall with a rectangular opening. Behind the wall was a three-person firing squad facing Mr. Sigmon through the opening.
Witnesses sat in chairs along one wall of the chamber behind bullet-resistant glass.
Mr. Sigmon’s lawyers had asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review his case and issue a stay of execution, but the court did not grant one. Mr. Sigmon had also asked Gov. Henry McMaster, a Republican, for clemency, but that was denied. The governor has not granted clemency to a prisoner on death row since the state restarted executions last year.
Because of a shield law passed in 2023, little is known about the members of the firing squad. According to a spokeswoman with the Department of Corrections, they train every month, year-round. A 2022 news release about renovations to the death chamber said that the firing squad consisted of department employees who volunteered to take part. They shoot a type of ammunition often used in police rifles.
Three other states — Mississippi, Oklahoma and Idaho — allow the firing squad as a secondary method of execution, to be used only if a lethal injection drug cannot be obtained. In Idaho, the State Senate recently passed a bill that would make death by firing squad the primary method.
The firing squad became legal in South Carolina in 2021, after the state passed a law that allowed death by electric chair or firing squad as options for people on death row. Inmates sued the state, claiming that both methods were cruel, corporal or unusual punishments, which are prohibited by the State Constitution.
The South Carolina Supreme Court, which is dominated by Republican appointees, ruled last year that both methods were legal, writing that neither could be considered cruel or unusual because prisoners chose their method.
Since that ruling, the state’s Department of Corrections has now executed four people, three of whom chose to be killed by lethal injection. (NY Times)