A South Carolina man convicted of murder has been executed by firing squad, the first US prisoner to die by that method in 15 years.
Brad Sigmon, 67, was pronounced dead at 6.08pm local time after being shot by three volunteer prison employees wielding rifles loaded with live ammunition.
Sigmon killed his ex-girlfriend’s parents with a baseball bat in their Greenville County home in 2001 in a botched plot to kidnap their daughter. He told police he planned to take her for a romantic weekend, then kill her and himself.
Sigmon’s lawyers said he chose the firing squad because the electric chair would “cook him alive”, and he feared that a lethal injection of pentobarbital into his veins would send a rush of fluid and blood into his lungs and drown him.
The details of South Carolina’s lethal injection method are kept secret in South Carolina, and Sigmon unsuccessfully asked the state Supreme Court on Thursday to pause his execution because of that.
Brad Sigmon. (South Carolina Department of Corrections via AP)
The armed prison employees stood 15 feet from where Sigmon sat in the state’s death chamber — the same distance as the backboard is from the free-throw line on a basketball court.
The firing squad is an execution method with a long and violent history in the US and around the world. Death in a hail of bullets has been used to punish mutinies and desertion in armies, as frontier justice in America’s Old West and as a tool of terror and political repression in the former Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.
Since 1977, only three other prisoners in the US have been executed by firing squad. All were in Utah, most recently Ronnie Lee Gardner in 2010. Another Utah man, Ralph Menzies, could be next; he is awaiting the result of a hearing in which his lawyers argued that his dementia makes him unfit for execution.
In South Carolina on Friday, a group of protesters holding signs with messages such as “All life is precious” and “Execute justice not people” gathered outside the prison before Sigmon’s execution.
Supporters and lawyers for Sigmon asked Republican governor Henry McMaster to commute his sentence to life in prison.
They said he was a model prisoner trusted by guards and worked every day to atone for the killings and also that he committed the killings after succumbing to severe mental illness.
But Mr McMaster denied the clemency plea. No governor has ever commuted a death sentence in the state, where 46 other prisoners have been executed since the death penalty resumed in the US in 1976.
Seven have died in the electric chair and 39 others by lethal injection.
In the early 2000s, South Carolina was among the busiest death penalty states, carrying out an average of three executions a year. But officials suspended executions for 13 years, in part because they were unable to obtain lethal injection drugs.