Firing Squad Execution Due In South Carolina, First In 15 Years

South Carolina is preparing this week to execute a man by firing squad, a capital punishment method that hasn’t been used in the U.S. in nearly 15 years. Since the Supreme Court lifted its ban on capital punishment in 1976, states have used five different execution methods: lethal injection, electrocution, lethal gas, firing squad and hanging. Brad Sigmon is scheduled to die Friday in South Carolina. He was convicted of killing his ex-girlfriend’s parents with a baseball bat at their home in 2001, the Associated Press reports. Lethal injection has been the preferred method in the modern era, with 1,428 carried out since 1976. Texas has done the most, killing 593 inmates, says the nonprofit Penalty Information Center. Twenty-eight states as well as the U.S. military and U.S. government authorize the use of lethal injection, in which inmates have a deadly mixture of drugs injected as they are strapped to a gurney. Lethal injections have been plagued by problems, including delays in finding suitable veins, needles becoming clogged or disengaged and problems with securing enough of the required drugs. “A number of states are beginning to experiment with new methods of execution ... because of the problems with lethal injection,” said law Prof. John Banzhaf of George Washington University.

Nine states authorize the use of electrocution, including Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Tennessee. Since 1976, 163 electrocutions have been carried out, only 19 since 2000. In this method, a person is strapped to a chair and has electrodes placed on the head and leg before a jolt of between 500 and 2,000 volts runs through the body. The last electrocution took place in 2020 in Tennessee. Texas used electrocution from 1924 to 1964, killing 361 inmates. The electric chair Texas used was nicknamed “Old Sparky.” It is displayed at the Texas Prison Museum in Huntsville, where the state’s death chamber is located. Lethal gas is authorized as the default execution method in eight states: Alabama, Arizona, California, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma and Wyoming. From 1979 to 1999, 11 inmates were executed using this method, in which a prisoner would be strapped to a chair in an airtight chamber before it was filled with cyanide gas. In 2024, Alabama revived this method when it became the first state to use nitrogen to execute Kenneth Eugene Smith. A mask is placed over a prisoner’s face and nitrogen gas is pumped in, depriving the person of oxygen and resulting in death. Five states authorize firing squads, but it is not the primary execution method. For this method, an inmate is usually bound to a chair and is shot through the heart by a group of prison staffers standing 20 to 25 feet away.