South Carolina is scheduled next week to be the first state in 15 years and only the third in 49 to carry out an execution by firing squad.
Brad Sigmon, 67, is on death row for the 2001 beating death with a baseball bat of his former girlfriend’s parents in Greenville County. He confessed that he was trying to kidnap his girlfriend and then planned a murder-suicide.
Short of asking Gov. Henry McMaster to spare him through a sentence of life without parole, Sigmon is scheduled to die March 7. His lawyers have asked for a postponement wanting more information on lethal injection drug and procedures in the state. South Carolina allows inmates to choose firing squad, lethal injection or electric chair, and an execution as recent as Jan. 31 created questions about doses needed.
Sigmon’s lawyers, according to papers filed Wednesday, have questions of the state about the drugs potency and purity. Improper lethal injections can leave an inmate suffering, or tortured lawyers say, with fluid in their lungs that slows the death.
The defense team described the electric chair as getting cooked alive.
In a firing squad execution, the inmate is strapped to a chair in the death chamber. A hood is placed over the head, a target put on the heart. The shooters, three volunteers, all have live ammunition and fire from an opening about 15 feet away.
All three firing squad executions since 1976 have happened in Utah, including the last in 2010.