The state of South Carolina executed a convicted murderer by firing squad on Friday night in the first such execution in the United States since 2010.
The inmate, Brad Sigmon, 67, was declared dead at 6:08 p.m. after a firing squad shot three bullets at the target placed over his heart, the State Department of Corrections said.
A judge had ordered Mr. Sigmon, who was convicted of beating his ex-girlfriend’s parents to death with a baseball bat in 2001, to choose from three methods of execution: lethal injection, electrocution or firing squad. His lawyer, Gerald King, said that Mr. Sigmon had chosen to be shot because he had concerns about South Carolina’s lethal injection process.
According to three reporters who witnessed the execution, Mr. Sigmon took several deep breaths before the shots were fired. After he was shot, his chest rose and fell about two times and his arms stiffened, according to the reporters, who were from The Associated Press, The Post and Courier and WYFF, a local TV station.
Mr. Sigmon is the first inmate in South Carolina history to be killed in such a manner. Polls show that a majority of Americans favor the death penalty, but many view the firing squad as an archaic form of justice. But as lethal injection drugs have become harder to obtain, and have at times resulted in botched executions, several states have recently legalized firing squads as an execution method.
Utah had previously been the only state to use a firing squad in modern times; it did so in 2010, 1996 and 1977.
Mr. Sigmon was executed in the death chamber at the Broad River Correctional Institution in Columbia, the state capital. He was strapped to a metal chair in a corner of the room, sitting 15 feet from a wall with a rectangular opening. Behind that wall was the three-person firing squad, facing Mr. Sigmon through the opening.
Witnesses sat in chairs along one wall of the chamber behind bullet-resistant glass. They could see the prisoner, but not the firing squad’s rifles through the opening.
In a final statement read by his lawyer, Mr. Sigmon said he wanted his message “to be one of love and a calling to my fellow Christians to help us end the death penalty.”
“Nowhere does God in the New Testament give man the authority to kill another man,” he said in the statement.
Mr. Sigmon wore a black jumpsuit and his mouth was covered. He could slightly move his head, witnesses said, and he tilted it toward the witness room before nodding toward Mr. King, his lawyer, and appearing to exchange words with him. Witnesses said it was not clear what was said.
A hood was then placed over Mr. Sigmon’s head. There was no countdown before the shots were simultaneously fired.
The group of witnesses also included three members of the victims’ family and Mr. Sigmon’s spiritual adviser, the Rev. Hillary Taylor.
Mr. Sigmon’s lawyers had asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review his case and issue a stay of execution, but the court did not grant one. Mr. Sigmon had also asked Gov. Henry McMaster, a Republican, for clemency, but that was denied by Mr. McMaster, who has not granted clemency to a prisoner on death row since the state restarted executions last year.
Shortly before the execution, dozens of protesters held signs outside the correctional facility that read “Thou shalt not kill” and “All life is precious.”
Ms. Taylor said that Mr. Sigmon had become an astute reader of the Bible and served as an informal chaplain to other prisoners. She added that he chose to share his last meal, a large bucket of KFC fried chicken, with his fellow inmates.
Because of a shield law passed in 2023, little is known about the members of the firing squad. According to a spokeswoman with the Department of Corrections, they train every month, year-round. A 2022 news release about renovations to the death chamber said that the firing squad consisted of department employees who volunteered to take part. They shoot a type of ammunition often used in police rifles.
Three other states — Mississippi, Oklahoma and Idaho — allow the firing squad as a secondary method of execution, to be used only if a lethal injection drug cannot be obtained. In Idaho, the State Senate recently passed a bill that would make death by firing squad the primary method.
The firing squad became legal in South Carolina in 2021, after the state passed a law that allowed death by electric chair or firing squad as options for people on death row. Inmates sued the state, claiming that both methods were cruel, corporal or unusual punishments, which are prohibited by the State Constitution.
The South Carolina Supreme Court, which is dominated by Republican appointees, ruled last year that both methods were legal, writing that neither could be considered cruel or unusual because prisoners could choose their method.
Since that ruling, the state’s Department of Corrections has now executed four people, three of whom chose to be killed by lethal injection. But Mr. King said that Mr. Sigmon had chosen a firing squad because of his concerns about South Carolina’s process with the lethal injection drug, pentobarbital.
Mr. King has argued in court that the Department of Corrections had not shared basic facts about the drug that one “would want to know to feel confident that they’ll work as intended,” such as how it is stored, how quickly it expires and how it has been tested. South Carolina does not make its lethal injection protocol public.
A department spokeswoman said last month that the agency had turned over all information about the drug in litigation and that it had “sworn to the effectiveness” of it.
Lindsey Vann, the executive director of the nonprofit Justice 360, represented two inmates in the state, Richard B. Moore and Marion Bowman Jr., whose recent executions by lethal injection did not go as planned.
Ms. Vann said that in both instances, a second dose of pentobarbital was administered 10 minutes after the first, and that in both cases the men did not die for more than 20 minutes after the procedure began. (Mr. Moore initially chose to be executed by a firing squad but changed his mind after the state procured lethal injection drugs.)
Mr. King said Mr. Sigmon felt that “the firing squad is what is left, given what he knows about the electric chair, and what he doesn’t know about lethal injection.” Mr. King said his client was feeling a “mix of fear and frustration.”
“Everything about this barbaric, state-sanctioned atrocity, from the choice to the method itself, is abjectly cruel,” Mr. King said in a statement.
Mr. Sigmon’s lawyers have said that he suffered from an inherited mental illness and childhood brain damage. Those factors, they argued, contributed to him murdering his ex-girlfriend’s parents, David and Gladys Larke. After he killed them, Mr. Sigmon tried to kidnap his ex-girlfriend.
The victims’ grandson, Ricky Sims, told The Greenville News that Mr. Sigmon needed to pay for what he had done. “He took away two people who would have done anything for their family,” he said.
