COLUMBIA, S.C. — A South Carolina man convicted of homicide was executed by firing squad Friday, the primary U.S. prisoner to die by that methodology in 15 years.
Brad Sigmon, 67, was pronounced lifeless at 6:08 p.m. after being shot by three volunteer jail staff wielding rifles loaded with dwell ammunition.
Sigmon killed his ex-girlfriend’s dad and mom with a baseball bat of their Greenville County residence in 2001 in a botched plot to kidnap their daughter. He instructed police he deliberate to take her for a romantic weekend, then kill her and himself.
Sigmon’s attorneys mentioned he selected the firing squad as a result of the electrical chair would “prepare dinner him alive,” and he feared {that a} deadly injection of pentobarbital into his veins would ship a rush of fluid and blood into his lungs and drown him.
The small print of South Carolina’s deadly injection methodology are saved secret in South Carolina, and Sigmon unsuccessfully requested the state Supreme Court on Thursday to pause his execution due to that.
The armed jail staff stood 15 toes (4.6 meters) from the place Sigmon sat within the state’s demise chamber — the identical distance because the backboard is from the free-throw line on a basketball court docket. Seen in the identical small room was the state’s unused electrical chair. The gurney used to hold out deadly injections had been rolled away.
Sigmon had a hood over his head and a goal over his coronary heart. The volunteers all fired on the identical time by openings in a wall. They weren’t seen to a few dozen witnesses in a room separated from the chamber by bullet-resistant glass.
The firing squad is an execution methodology with an extended and violent historical past within the U.S. and all over the world. Dying in a hail of bullets has been used to punish mutinies and desertion in armies, as frontier justice in America’s Previous West and as a device of terror and political repression within the former Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.
Since 1977 solely three different prisoners within the U.S. have been executed by firing squad. All have been in Utah, most just lately Ronnie Lee Gardner in 2010. One other Utah man, Ralph Menzies, could possibly be subsequent; he’s awaiting the results of a listening to during which his attorneys argued that his dementia makes him unfit for execution.
In South Carolina on Friday, a gaggle of protesters holding indicators with messages similar to “All life is treasured” and “Execute justice not individuals” gathered exterior the jail earlier than Sigmon’s execution.
Supporters and attorneys for Sigmon requested Republican Gov. Henry McMaster to commute his sentence to life in jail. They mentioned he was a mannequin prisoner trusted by guards and labored each day to atone for the killings and likewise that he dedicated the killings after succumbing to extreme psychological sickness.
However McMaster denied the clemency plea. No governor has ever commuted a demise sentence within the state, the place 46 different prisoners have been executed for the reason that demise penalty resumed within the U.S. in 1976. Seven have died within the electrical chair and 39 others by deadly injection.
Within the early 2000s, South Carolina was among the many busiest demise penalty states, finishing up a median of three executions a 12 months. However officers suspended executions for 13 years, partly as a result of they have been unable to acquire deadly injection medicine.
The state Supreme Court cleared the way in which to renew them in July. Freddie Owens was the primary to be put to demise, on Sept. 20, after McMaster denied him clemency. Richard Moore was executed on Nov. 1 and Marion Bowman Jr. on Jan. 31.
Going ahead, the court will enable an execution each 5 weeks.
South Carolina now has 28 inmates on its demise row together with two who’ve exhausted their appeals and are awaiting execution, probably this spring. Only one man has been added to demise row previously decade.
Earlier than executions have been paused, greater than 60 individuals confronted demise sentences. A lot of these have both had their sentences decreased to life or died in jail.
