South Carolina Adds Firing Squad as a Method of Execution

Last year, South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster signed legislation into law that added firing squad as a choice of execution method for death row inmates.

The state hasn’t executed any inmates since 2011 because of its inability to procure lethal injection drugs, so the legislature proposed adding a firing squad in order to be able to resume executions after an 11-year delay. South Carolina currently has 37 inmates on death row.

Now inmates will have a choice between execution by firing squad or death in the state’s 109-year-old electric chair, the AP reports. On Friday, the South Carolina Department of Corrections informed Attorney General Alan Wilson that the $53,600 renovations to construct a firing squad chamber were complete.

“According to officials, the death chamber now also includes a metal chair, with restraints, in the corner of the room in which inmates will sit if they choose execution by firing squad,” AP reporter Meg Kinnard writes. “That chair faces a wall with a rectangular opening, 15 feet away, through which the three shooters will fire their weapons.”

The inmate will be given an opportunity to make a final statement before a Department of Corrections employee places a hood over the inmate’s head and secures him or her into the chair.

“The three shooters, all volunteers who are employees of the Corrections Department, will have rifles loaded with live ammunition, with their weapons trained on the inmate’s heart,” Kinnard reports.

The Death Penalty Information Center notes that South Carolina is one of 27 states that have a death penalty. Additionally, the state is one of eight states that use the electric chair and four that use a firing squad. Since the death penalty was re-established in the U.S. in 1977, only three inmates have been put to death by firing squad, all of them in Utah.

The decision to enact a firing squad option for executions in South Carolina came after a long debate over what method would be the most humane and least painful.

“The death penalty is going to stay the law here for a while,” declared state Sen. Dick Harpootlian (D-District 20), who introduced the legislation. “If we’re going to have it, it ought to be humane.”

Immediately after McMaster signed the bill into law last May, two inmates sued the state, claiming that they couldn’t be executed under the current choices because lethal injection was the only option for execution in South Carolina when they were sentenced.

The current law still defaults to lethal injection as the primary choice as long as the drugs are available, but if the state cannot procure the chemicals, electrocution and firing squad are the primary choices.

Criminal justice advocates maintain that the electric chair and firing squad are antiquated methods of execution that represent a step backward from the more humane method of lethal injection.

“These are execution methods that previously were replaced by lethal injection, which is considered more humane, and it makes South Carolina the only state going back to the less humane execution methods,” Lindsey Vann of Justice 360, a non-profit group advocating for many of the state’s death row inmates, told the AP last year.

Last June, the South Carolina Supreme Court blocked the executions of the two inmates who sued.

“The high court halted the scheduled executions of Brad Sigmon and Freddie Owens, writing that officials needed to put together a firing squad so that inmates could really choose between that or the electric chair,” Kinnard reports.

However, now that the firing squad chamber is ready, courts can issue new orders for Sigmon and Owens to choose their method of execution.