A South Carolina man convicted of murder has been executed, becoming the first person in the United States to be executed in this manner in 15 years.
Brad Sigmon, 67, was pronounced dead at 6:08 p.m. local time after three prison volunteers opened fire on him using rifles loaded with live ammunition.
Sigmon killed his ex-girlfriend's parents with a baseball bat in their Greenville County home in 2001 while attempting to kidnap their daughter. He told police he planned to take her away for a romantic weekend and then kill her and himself.
Sigmon's lawyers argued that he chose the firing squad because the electric chair would “boil him alive” and he feared that a lethal injection of pentobarbital would cause fluid and blood to enter his lungs and cause him to choke.
Information about South Carolina's lethal injection method is kept secret, and Sigmon unsuccessfully asked the state Supreme Court on Thursday to stay the execution for that reason.
Guards armed with firearms stood 15 feet from where Sigmon sat on the state's death row, the same distance as the backboard from the free-throw line on a basketball court.
The firing squad is an execution method with a long and brutal history both in the United States and around the world. Death by bullets has been used to punish rebels and deserters in the military, as frontier justice in the American Wild West, and as a tool of terror and political repression in the former Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.
Since 1977, only three other U.S. inmates 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 outcome of a hearing in which his lawyers argued that his mental state makes him unfit to be executed.
On Friday in South Carolina, a group of protesters holding signs that read “Every life is precious” and “Delivering justice, not people” gathered outside a prison ahead of Sigmon's execution.
Sigmon's supporters and defenders have asked Republican Gov. Henry McMaster to commute his sentence to life in prison.
They claimed he was a model prisoner trusted by guards and worked every day to atone for the murders, and that he committed the crimes while suffering from severe mental illness.
However, Mr McMaster rejected the request
Sourse: breakingnews.ie
