South Carolina Murderer To Be Executed by Firing Squad After Final Appeal Rejected

A death row inmate in South Carolina is slated to be executed by firing squad Friday after the state’s Supreme Court rejected what is expected to be his final appeal effort. At 6:00 p.m, Brad Sigmon, 67, will be the first man in 15 years to be executed by shooting and only the fourth since the death penalty was reinstated in America in 1976. The convicted double murderer specifically requested the archaic execution method over death by electric chair, which he feared would “burn and cook him alive,” his lawyer stated. He similarly rejected the lethal injection method, citing the uncomfortable fate of three previous death row inmates in South Carolina whose final throes lasted 20 minutes. Sigmon was convicted in 2002 for beating to death his ex-girlfriend’s parents with a baseball bat, leaving her father’s head “basically broken in two,” prosecutors said at his trial. He planned to kidnap and murder his ex-girlfriend before turning the gun on himself. She managed to escape his car and return to safety before he could do so. He confessed his scheme after his arrest, telling a detective: “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.” Sigmon admitted to the murders and never claimed innocence. During the trial, he acknowledged to the jurors that he “probably” deserved to die for his crimes, though he added that “I don’t want to die. It would kill my mom, my brothers and my sisters. I just want to live for my family’s sake.”On Friday night, Sigmon will be guided to an enclosed brick-walled chamber where officials will place a target over his heart, strap him to a chair, and cover his head with a hood. Three volunteer shooters, standing some 15-feet away, will fire rifles at him. All guns will be loaded with live, .308-caliber rounds designed to break apart and spread on impact, destroying as much of the heart as possible. Sigmon’s legal team unsuccessfully pushed to delay his execution, arguing that the state needed to issue additional information about the lethal injection method so that their client could pick his poison with adequate guidance. In their Supreme Court filing, the attorneys referenced the state’s autopsy report for a death row inmate executed by lethal injection, Marion Bowman Jr., who had “died with his lungs massively swollen with blood and fluid,” similar to a “drowning.”Bowman reportedly required two doses of the lethal injection drug, a sedative called pentobarbital. Given that the details of South Carolina’s injection procedure are hidden behind a shield law, the state’s standard administered dose is unknown. The firing squad method was popularized during the Civil War as a punishment for soldiers who deserted. It has since become one of the more unusual and controversial types of executions, with some criticizing it as barbaric. Others view death by shooting as a more humane option given that the prisoners are usually killed instantaneously. It is also the only method of execution that boasts a 0 percent botch rate. Sigmon’s execution comes on the heels of a bill passed in Idaho that would make death by firing squad the state’s primary method of execution. The bill’s sponsor, Representative Doug Ricks, proposed the measure in light of last year’s botched execution of Thomas Eugene Creech, during which Idaho officials struggled to find a vein to insert the IV. Firing squad executions remain legal in Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Utah. In Utah, though, one of the five shooters is given a blank, so that the identity of the shooter who fired the fatal shot remains unknown.

South Carolina Murderer To Be Executed by Firing Squad After Final Appeal Rejected

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