When the clock strikes 6 Friday evening, a South Carolina man will walk into the death chamber, be strapped into a chair and have a target placed over his heart. He may utter last words before a hood is placed over his head, a curtain shielding him from spectators is swept aside and three volunteers armed with rifles simultaneously fire bullets designed to shatter on impact with his chest.
Unless the governor or the U.S. Supreme Court grants him a last-minute reprieve, Brad Sigmon, 67, will be the first person to die by firing squad in the U.S. since 2010 — and just the fourth since the death penalty resumed in the U.S. 49 years ago.
Sigmon, who admitted to killing his ex-girlfriend’s parents with a baseball bat after she refused to come back to him, said he chose to die by bullets because he considered the other choices offered by the state to be worse.
His lawyers said he didn’t want to pick the electric chair, which would “cook him alive,” or a lethal injection, whose details are kept secret in South Carolina. He also feared an injection of pentobarbital into his veins would send a rush of fluid into his lungs and drown him. On Thursday, Sigmon asked the U.S. Supreme Court to delay his execution because the state doesn’t release enough information about the lethal injection drug.
The death row inmate’s only remaining choice was a firing squad, an execution method with a long and violent history in the U.S. 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.
In recent years, however, some death penalty proponents have started to see the firing squad as a more humane option: If the shooters’ aim is true, death is nearly instant, whereas lethal injections require getting an IV into a vein. Electrocution appears to burn and disfigure. And inmates have been seen to writhe and struggle when the latest method, nitrogen gas, is used to suffocate them as it is pushed through a mask.
Ronnie Gardner was the last prisoner to be executed by firing squad, in Utah in 2010. His brother doesn’t agree the method is more humane.
“This will be gruesome and barbaric,” Randy Gardner said. He said he didn’t witness his brother’s death but carries his autopsy photos in an envelope. He pulled several out to show an Associated Press reporter who will witness Friday’s execution.
“With the ammunition they are using here (in Sigmon’s execution) it is going to be so much worse,” Gardner said.
South Carolina turned to the firing squad as it struggled to find alternate methods to execute condemned inmates. By the beginning of this decade, the state’s supply of lethal injection drugs was gone and no company would sell more except anonymously, which was not allowed at the time. Judges would not set execution dates if the electric chair was the only method. Thirteen years elapsed between executions, and cases of death row inmates started to pile up.
A Democratic lawmaker in South Carolina suggested a firing squad if the state was going to keep capital punishment. Supporters cited U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who wrote in a 2017 dissent that “in addition to being near instant, death by shooting may also be comparatively painless.”
Sigmon has been close to death before. He had execution dates set three times, but each time it was when the state didn’t have lethal injection drugs and judges halted his death warrant because he couldn’t choose that method.
Sigmon beat to death his ex-girlfriend’s parents with a baseball bat because he was angry that they had him evicted from a trailer they owned. They were in separate rooms of their Greenville County home and Sigmon went back and forth attacking them until they were dead, investigators said.
Sigmon then kidnapped his ex-girlfriend at gunpoint, but she escaped from his car. He shot at her as she ran, but missed, prosecutors said.
“My intention was to kill her and then myself,” Sigmon said in a confession typed out by a detective after his arrest. “That was my intention all along. If I couldn’t have her, I wasn’t going to let anybody else have her. And I knew it got to the point where I couldn’t have her.”
If the U.S. Supreme Court doesn’t intervene, Sigmon has one last chance at survival: His lawyers asked Republican Gov. Henry McMaster to commute his death sentence to life in prison. They said Sigmon is a model prisoner trusted by guards and works every day to atone for the killings he committed after succumbing to severe mental illness.
Sigmon will share his final meal with some fellow prisoners on death row and plans to give away the money in his commissary accounts, his supporters said.
The prison warden will be on a call with McMaster and the South Carolina Attorney General’s Office just before the execution starts. If the lawyers report no outstanding appeals and the governor refuses clemency, Sigmon will be brought into the death chamber.
No South Carolina governor has granted clemency to a prisoner scheduled for execution since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976. Since then, 46 men have been put to death in the state.
The state Supreme Court has been issuing death warrants every five weeks. Two more inmates are currently out of appeals; they will also get to choose between lethal injection, firing squad or the electric chair.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.