A man was executed by firing squad on Friday, for the first time in 15 years after he chose to die by that method, which he saw as preferable to the electric chair or lethal injection. Brad Sigmon, 67, was executed by three volunteer prison employees who used rifles. He was pronounced dead at 6:08 pm.
The South Carolina man had killed his ex-girlfriend’s parents, David and Gladys Larke, in their Greenville County home in 2001 with a baseball bat. Sigmon had planned to kidnap the daughter and take her for a romantic weekend, then kill her and himself.
According to the Associated Press (AP) report, on Friday, Sigmon wore a black jumpsuit with a hood over his head and a white target with a red bullseye over his chest. The armed prison employees stood 15 feet from where he sat in the state’s death chamber. The volunteers who weren’t visible to about a dozen witnesses in a room separated from the chamber by bullet-resistant glass fired at the same time through openings in a wall. A doctor came out about a minute later and examined Sigmon for 90 seconds before declaring him dead.
Sigmon’s lawyers stated that he opted for the firing squad because he feared the electric chair would “cook him alive” and worried that a lethal injection of pentobarbital would cause fluid and blood to rush into his lungs, drowning him, as per the report.
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While the details of South Carolina’s lethal injection method are kept secret, Sigmon had unsuccessfully petitioned the state Supreme Court on Thursday to halt his execution for that reason.
History of firing squad execution
As an execution method, the firing squad has a long and violent history in the US and globally. It has been used to punish mutineers and deserters in military forces, as a form of 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 in Utah — the most recent being Ronnie Lee Gardner in 2010. Another Utah inmate, Ralph Menzies, could be next, pending the outcome of a hearing where his lawyers argue that his dementia makes him unfit for execution.
Supporters For Sigmon
Several supporters and lawyers for Sigmon urged Republican Governor Henry McMaster to commute his sentence to life in prison. They argued that he had been a model prisoner, trusted by guards, and had worked daily to atone for the killings. They also contended that he committed the crimes while suffering from severe mental illness.
However, McMaster denied the clemency plea. No governor in the state has ever commuted a death sentence. Since the death penalty resumed in the US in 1976, South Carolina has executed 46 prisoners—seven by electric chair and 39 by lethal injection.
