‘Barbarous’: Activists dismayed as South Carolina completes firing squad chamber to resume executions

Just four states use firing squads

Social justice advocates are dismayed that South Carolina is ready to begin executing death row inmates by firing squad, calling it a “barbarous” practice that should be consigned to history.

Last week, the South Carolina Department of Corrections announced it had completed renovations to its death chamber, spending more than $53,000 to prepare it for a firing squad of three riflemen to shoot inmates through the heart.

“The inmate will be given the opportunity to make a last statement,” the agency wrote in a statement about the renovations, which were pursuant to a new May 2021 law authorising firing squads, as the state has struggled to locate lethal injection drugs in recent years.

“The inmate will be strapped into the chair,” the Department continued, “and a hood will be placed over his head. A small aim point will be placed over his heart by a member of the execution team. After the warden reads the execution order, the team will fire. After the shots, a doctor will examine the inmate.”

If inmates decline to be executed by firing squad, they can elect lethal injection drugs or the electric chair, methods which have been rife with complications and botched killings in the past.

The outside of South Carolina’s death row. (Associated Press)

This week, Justice 360, an advocacy group, has filed a lawsuit seeking to stop the “barbarous” planned executions of inmates Freddie Owens and Brad Sigmon now that a firing squad is on the table. Both men, whose executions were scheduled prior to the signing of the firing squad law, opted for lethal injection drugs, which the state still hasn’t been able to procure.

“South Carolina’s going to be an outlier, in the only state that will forcibly shoot or electrocute people,” Mr Blume told WCIV. "Alternately, SCDC intends to use the state’s over 100-year-old electric chair, a method with more than a century-long record of horrifically botched executions," his group said in a recent press release.

Other local activists have come out against the firing squad, calling it part of a larger problem with the death penalty, a punishment that’s been shown to be levied against a high number of innocent people, and disproportionately be used against people of colour.

“The governor and his enablers have framed the debate around methodology, not morality. Headlines have tended to focus on the novel ways [South Carolina governor Henry] McMaster wants to kill imprisoned people: by gunfire, by electrocution, or by poison,” the Charleston Democratic Socialists of America wrote in a statement. “We want to make it crystal clear: The death penalty is an immoral tool of white supremacy. It is cruel and arbitrary. It brings neither justice nor peace.”

The law’s defenders have said a firing squad is the quickest and least painful way to execute someone

“The death penalty is going to stay the law here for a while,” Democratic state senator Dick Harpootlian, who introduced the firing squad method, said last year. “If we’re going to have it, it ought to be humane.”

Since then, Republicans in the state have pushed for “shield” laws that would allow drugmakers to confidentially sell lethal injection poisons to South Carolina.

Many drug companies have stopped selling their compounds for use in executions, and South Carolina hasn’t executed anyone since 2011, in part because it hasn’t been able to secure and swiftly use lethal injection drugs.

Thirty-five people currently sit on South Carolina’s death row. If firing squad executions restart, those inmates will join the only three people who have been executed by firing squad in the US since 1976.

South Carolina is one of four states with a legal option to use firing squads in the execution chamber, along with Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Utah.

Though 26 states have either abolished or put moratoria on the death penalty, it still remains popular in the US South, where only Virginia has outlawed executions.

The Independent and the nonprofit Responsible Business Initiative for Justice (RBIJ) have launched a joint campaign calling for an end to the death penalty in the US. The RBIJ has attracted more than 150 well-known signatories to their Business Leaders Declaration Against the Death Penalty - with The Independent as the latest on the list. We join high-profile executives like Ariana Huffington, Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, and Virgin Group founder Sir Richard Branson as part of this initiative and are making a pledge to highlight the injustices of the death penalty in our coverage.