COLUMBIA, S.C. — When the clock struck 6 p.m. Friday evening, a South Carolina man walked into the death chamber, was strapped into a chair and had a target placed over his heart. He uttered some last words before a hood was placed over his head, a curtain shielded him from spectators and was swept aside. Three volunteers armed with rifles simultaneously fired bullets designed to shatter on impact with his chest.
Brad Sigmon, 67, was 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.
Sigmon was pronounced dead at 6:08 p.m.
The Associated Press reports 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.
A doctor came out about a minute later and examined Sigmon for 90 seconds before declaring him dead.
Witnesses included three family members of the victims, David and Gladys Larke. Also present were Sigmon’s attorney and spiritual advisor, a representative from the prosecuting solicitor’s office, a sheriff’s investigator and three members of the news media.
Sigmon delivered a closing statement, saying he was “one of love and a calling to my fellow Christians to help us end the death penalty.”
The firing squad has a long and violent history
Sigmon’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.
Inside the execution chamber
The chamber inside which Sigmon died is just a short walk from South Carolina’s death row, where the prisoner has lived for the past 23 years.
When the curtain opened Friday evening, Sigmon’s lawyer, family members of the victims and three members of the news media will watch from behind glass recently upgraded to be bullet resistant.
The shooters were 15 feet (4.6 meters) away — the length from the backboard to the free-throw line on a basketball court.
Each was armed with .308-caliber, Winchester 110-grain TAP Urban ammunition often used by police marksmen. The bullet is designed to shatter on impact with something hard, like an inmate’s chest bones, sending fragments meant to destroy the heart and cause death almost immediately.
The process took about five minutes – roughly a quarter of the time it would have taken to kill Sigmon with lethal injection.
Why does South Carolina have a firing squad?
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 had 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.
What crime did Sigmon commit?
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.”
One last chance to live
If the U.S. Supreme Court didn’t intervene, Sigmon had 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 shared his final meal with some fellow prisoners on death row and planned to give away the money in his commissary accounts, his supporters said.
The prison warden was on a call with McMaster and the South Carolina Attorney General’s Office just before the execution started. If the lawyers reported no outstanding appeals and the governor refused clemency, Sigmon would be brought into the death chamber.
McMaster denied the clemency plea.
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.