There’s no reason for SC to execute inmates in the electric chair or by firing squad
On Friday, May 14, Gov. Henry McMaster signed a bill making electrocution South Carolina’s primary method of execution. It also provided the men on death row with the option of death by a firing squad. Why did South Carolina become the first state to move away from lethal injection, which has repeatedly been recognized by the Supreme Court as the most humane method of execution? Supposedly because the Department of Corrections is unable to obtain the drugs necessary for the lethal injection executions of two death row inmates who completed the ordinary appeals process earlier this year.
This “crisis” that was the impetus for the legislature to turn back the clock and embrace barbaric methods of execution, however, was entirely of SCDC’s making. SCDC Director Bryan Stirling has, by his own admission, known that SCDC did not have execution drugs since at least 2013. Furthermore, Stirling, Attorney General Allen Wilson and McMaster have known for several years that a small cohort of death row inmates were nearing the end of their appeals. Stirling has stated publically that he can’t get the drugs due to the pressure anti-death penalty activists have placed on big pharma. Yet, there is no evidence anyone in South Carolina has done any such thing.
Furthermore, in the last two years, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Missouri, Tennessee, Texas, and South Dakota have all carried out executions by lethal injection. Those states found a way to obtain the necessary ingredients. In the last few months of the Trump Administration, the federal government carried out 13 executions by lethal injection. No convincing explanation has been offered why South Carolina cannot also find the necessary ingredients to carry out what has been South Carolina’s primary method of execution for the last twenty-five years.
Strapping someone into a chair and sending high voltage electricity into their body carries with it the significant likelihood of cooking the person to death. Both the process and the damage it does to the body is offensive to human dignity. I know this firsthand as I have watched a man die in the electric chair. It is not for the faint of heart. Its brutality is also the reason the last two state courts to consider the matter—the conservative Georgia and Nebraska Supreme Courts—ruled that death by electrocution was unconstitutional.
The firing squad may produce death quicker than electrocution, but it requires significantly more human involvement. All execution methods have varying degrees of human participation, but having citizens shoot other citizens like they do in China and other countries where basic human rights are denied sets a horrible example. Having multiple people shoot another human being in the chest with high powered rifles also does tremendous damage to the condemned inmate’s body. Again, I know this firsthand as I have reviewed autopsy photos of Gary Gilmore’s Utah execution by firing squad for a book I authored.
There are doubtless some people reading this op-ed thinking that electrocution and firing squad are more humane than the way in which the death-sentenced inmates killed their victims. And, in some cases, that is true. But a society that is not better than those it has sentenced to die has lost its moral compass. This is especially true when executions could be carried out in what has been deemed the most humane manner possible if South Carolina would, as seven other states and the federal government have done, find the drugs to conduct executions by lethal injection. Bringing back the electric chair and embracing the firing squad is not the answer.
This story was originally published May 23, 2021 at 5:00 AM.