South Carolina’s highest court decided on Wednesday that the state may resume executions of death row convicts by lethal injection, firing squad, or electric chair after a hiatus of more than ten years.
While two judges stated they believed the firing squad was an illegal method of execution and one justice believed the electric chair to be an unusually harsh form of punishment, all five members of the court concurred with the verdict in part.
Justice John Few argued in the majority ruling that the state’s decision to let prisoners select from among the three methods of execution is a genuine endeavor to lessen the cruel nature of the death sentence rather than a deliberate intention to cause suffering.
“We start by acknowledging the reality that there is simply no elegant way to kill a man,” he said. “Choice cannot be considered cruel because the condemned inmate may elect to have the State employ the method he and his lawyers believe will cause him the least pain,” Few added.
Congress gave the state permission to establish a firing squad in 2021 so that prisoners would have an option between it and the electric chair South Carolina authorities had purchased in 1912.
Since the United States reinstated the capital penalty in 1976, South Carolina has carried out 43 executions of prisoners. Since the option of lethal injection was introduced in 1995, almost all prisoners have selected it.
Since the United States reinstated the capital penalty in 1976, South Carolina has carried out 43 executions of prisoners – most of them by lethal injection, which was introduced in 1995.
South Carolina has not carried out an execution for the last 13 years, as the state’s supply of medicines for lethal injections ran out. After a shield law introduced in 2023 permitted officials to keep the identity of the providers of lethal injection drugs secret and get the sedative pentobarbital in September, the judges ruled that the state may now employ only one medication rather than three.
The death penalty is legal in 27 states in the United States, but only seven have carried out an execution in the last three years due to disagreements between advocates and lawyers regarding appropriate protocols, inhumane pain, and the legitimacy of novel techniques like firing squads and nitrogen gas suffocation, which are rarely employed outside of the armed forces.
