By killing Brad Sigmon by firing squad, South Carolina will revert to our uncivilized roots | Opinion

I’m wondering what happens if all three shooters South Carolina has selected to murder Brad Sigmon on March 7 miss his heart because of a bit of nervous energy. It’s possible, given the shooters will be making history as the first ever in state history to murder a man on death row by firing squad. Sigmon would be the first person shot to death in an execution in the U.S. in 15 years.

He is already the first South Carolina death row inmate to choose to be murdered by firing squad, though “choose” seems an ill-fitting word. His options: being shot to death, murdered by a lethal injection process that has had a bevy of problems, or fried in the electric chair.

“If he chose lethal injection, he risked the prolonged death suffered by all three of the men South Carolina has executed since September — three men Brad knew and cared for — who remained alive, strapped to a gurney, for more than twenty minutes,” his lawyers said in a statement. “At least one required a second, massive dose of pentobarbital before his heart stopped, and he died with his lungs swollen with fluid.”

Sigmon, 67, chose a firing squad because the lethal injection murders South Carolina has been committing since last fall have clearly illustrated the barbarism of that option. In their considered calculation, having bullets explode through Sigmon’s heart is less barbaric. Maybe they’re right.

Sigmon will be strapped to a chair with a hood over his head and an “aim point” over his heart in South Carolina’s death chamber. Three volunteers from the South Carolina Department of Corrections will fire at him through an opening 15 feet away. Witnesses will see Sigmon but not the shooters.

What if the unknown shooters chosen by the state have to shoot Sigmon a second time because their his aim was off just so? What if they miss that time as well? Or Sigmon’s heart doesn’t instantly stop beating even if the bullets hit him squarely in the chest? What if the blood splatters too far and too wide and the small crowd watching the murder vomit on the floor.

Sigmon is not a sympathetic figure. Most of the men on death row aren’t. He was convicted of murdering his girlfriend’s parents with a baseball bat. He took turns beating them to death then kidnapped their daughter at gunpoint.

Fortunately, she escaped. He shot at her but missed as she ran away.

“I couldn’t have her, I wasn’t going to let anybody else have her,” he apparently told investigators.

Sigmon had mental health problems and committed those crimes a quarter of a century ago. Even so, there’s no sugarcoating that level of depravity. He committed an unspeakable evil, the kind of act that imprints upon everyone who knew the victims in any way.

He committed murder. Justice demanded that he be held to account. But punishing murder with murder is the kind of thing we scold gang members for doing when one of their associates is killed in a drive-by shooting. And yet we’ve codified it into law, and made it as pretty as possible. That’s what lethal injection was supposed to do, make a clearly cruel and unusual punishment seem less cruel and unusual.

South Carolina won’t be able to hide that this time, though. There’s nothing neat and clean about shooting a man through the heart, nothing subtle about it.

I suspect state officials have tried to make this new type of murder for the state as pleasing to the eye as possible as well. South Carolina spent about $53,600 to build an area inside its murder chamber for the firing squad not far away from the electric chair. The Associated Press reported that the state installed bulletproof glass on the witness window and a basin under a chair to catch the blood.

Make no mistake about it. Strapping a man to a chair and shooting him is murder. It’s not justice even if it’s supposedly done in the name of the government.

With the March 7 murder of Sigmon, South Carolina will revert to our Neanderthal roots.

Things don’t have to be this way. Most nations in the industrialized world have outlawed such a primitive punishment. We should have, too.

The longer it remains in place, the more uncivilized we become.