The South Carolina Supreme Court has ruled the state's death penalty is legal. All five justices agreed with at least part of the ruling, opening the door to restart executions in a state that hasn’t put an inmate to death since 2011. South Carolina's death penalty now includes a firing squad as well as lethal injection and the electric chair.
FILE - This undated photo provided by the South Carolina Department of Corrections shows the state’s death chamber in Columbia, S.C., including the electric chair, right, and a firing squad chair, left. Quincy Allen, 44, was taken off death row Monday, July 22, 2024, after agreeing to a life sentence when a federal court overturned his 2005 death sentence for killing two people in South Carolina .
South Carolina has executed 43 inmates since the death penalty was restarted in the U.S. in 1976. Nearly all inmates have chosen lethal injection.Judge strikes down a North Carolina abortion restriction but upholds another Lawmakers authorized the state to create a firing squad in 2021 to give inmates a choice between it and the old electric chair. The inmates sued, saying either choice was cruel and unusual punishment prohibited by the Constitution.it had the sedative pentobarbital and changed the method of lethal injection execution from using three drugs to just one.
The state said in its argument before the state Supreme Court in February that lethal injection, electrocution and firing squad all fit existing death penalty protocols. “Courts have never held the death has to be instantaneous or painless,” wrote Grayson Lambert, a lawyer for Gov. Henry McMaster’s office.
“No inmate in the country has ever been put to death with such little transparency about how he or she would be executed,” Justice 360 lawyer Lindsey Vann wrote.
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