A South Carolina man has been executed by firing squad, becoming the first U.S. prisoner in 15 years to die by this method
A South Carolina man has been executed by firing squad, becoming the first U.S. prisoner in 15 years to die by this methodVivian Lovingood protests the scheduled execution of South Carolina inmate Brad Sigmon, Friday, March 7, 2025, in Columbia, S.
C. For the first time in 15 years a death row inmate in the U.S. will be executed by a firing squad. Three volunteer prison employees used rifles to carry out the execution of Brad Sigmon, 67, who was pronounced dead at 6:08 p.m. Sigmon killed his ex-girlfriend’s parents with a baseball bat in their Greenville County home in 2001 in a botched plot to kidnap their daughter. He told police he planned to take her for a romantic weekend, then kill her and himself. Sigmon's lawyers said he chose the firing squad because the electric chair would “cook him alive,” and he feared that a lethal injection of pentobarbital into his veins wouldin South Carolina, and Sigmon unsuccessfully asked the state Supreme Court on Thursday to pause his execution because of that. On Friday, Sigmon wore a black jumpsuit with a hood over his head and a white target with a red bullseye over his chest.stood 15 feet from where he sat in the state’s death chamber — the same distance as the backboard is from the free-throw line on a basketball court. Visible in the same small room was the state’s unused electric chair. The gurney used to carry out lethal injections had been rolled away. The volunteers all fired at the same time through openings in a wall. They were not visible to about a dozen witnesses in a room separated from the chamber by bullet-resistant glass. Sigmon made several heavy breaths during the two minutes that elapsed from when the hood was placed to the shots being fired. His arms briefly tensed when he was shot, and the target was blasted off his chest. He appeared to give another breath or two with a red stain on his chest, and small amounts of tissue could be seen from the wound during those breaths.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. Since 1977 only three other prisoners in the U.S. have been executed by firing squad. All were in Utah, most recently Ronnie Lee Gardner in 2010. Another Utah man, Ralph Menzies, could be next; he is awaiting the result of a hearing in which his lawyers argued that his dementia makes him unfit for execution. In South Carolina on Friday, a group of protesters holding signs with messages such as “All life is precious” and “Execute justice not people” gathered outside the prison before Sigmon's execution. Supporters and lawyers for Sigmon asked Republican Gov. Henry McMaster to commute his sentence to life in prison. They said he was a model prisoner trusted by guards and worked every day to atone for the killings and also that he committed the killings after succumbing to severe mental illness. But McMaster denied the clemency plea. No governor has ever commuted a death sentence in the state, where 46 other prisoners have been executed since the death penalty resumed in the U.S. in 1976. Seven have died in the electric chair and 39 others by lethal injection. In the early 2000s, South Carolina was among the busiest death penalty states, carrying out an average of three executions a year. But officialson its death row including two who have exhausted their appeals and are awaiting execution, most likely this spring. Just one man has been added to death row in the past decade. Before executions were paused, more than 60 people faced death sentences. Many of those have either had their sentences reduced to life or died in prison.
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