SC high court rules electrocution and firing squad are allowed execution methods

The South Carolina Supreme Court in Columbia. (Mary Ann Chastain / Special to the SC Daily Gazette)

COLUMBIA — South Carolina can execute condemned inmates by electrocution or firing squad after the state Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that both options are constitutional.

In a split decision , the high court ruled the methods are neither cruel nor unusual, noting both are options for carrying out a death sentence.

“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,” Justice John Few wrote in the lead opinion.

Similarly, he wrote, choices meant to make execution less inhumane can’t be considered unusual punishment: “A condemned inmate in South Carolina will never be subjected to execution by a method he contends is more inhumane than another method that is available.”

The ruling allows for five executions to be scheduled.

Those include three of the four men named in the lawsuit and two more inmates whose appeals have been exhausted while the case was pending, according to the state Department of Corrections.

Once the high court issues an execution notice for an inmate, the prison agency by law must set the date for four Fridays later.

“We’ll just wait and see what the court does,” Corrections Director Bryan Stirling said after the ruling posted. “I’m carrying out the law, and that’s just my job.”

The now-upheld law states the inmates will die in the electric chair unless they choose instead to die by firing squad or lethal injection. They must make the choice in writing 14 days before their execution date.

Justice George James signed on to Few’s opinion, while the newest justice, Garry Hill, agreed in a separate opinion. Retiring Chief Justice Don Beatty, as well as John Kittredge — who becomes chief justice Thursday — each wrote separate opinions partially to mostly disagreeing.

Beatty, not surprisingly, offered the biggest contrast.

While the entire death penalty law isn’t unconstitutional, carrying out a sentence by electrocution or firing squad violates the state’s ban against cruel, corporal, or unusual punishment, wrote Beatty, who has been willing to buck the Legislature on other high-profile cases challenging state law.

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Kittredge, perhaps most notably, determined the firing squad specifically is an unconstitutionally “unusual” method of execution.

The ruling overturns a 2022 decision from Richland County Judge Jocelyn Newman that found both methods unconstitutional.

Gov. Henry McMaster applauded the decision as upholding the rule of law.

“This decision is another step in ensuring that lawful sentences can be duly enforced and the families and loved ones of the victims receive the closure and justice they have long awaited,” he said in a statement.

The case was brought on behalf of condemned inmates — two as initially filed, two more were later added — challenging a 2021 law that reverted to electrocution as the default method of execution and added the option of death by firing squad.

At the time, the state was unable to carry out an execution because the Department of Corrections’ supply of lethal injection drugs had expired a decade earlier. Opposition to the death penalty had prevented the state’s prison agency from restocking them, as pharmaceutical companies refused to provide their drugs to kill people.

But the law kept lethal injection as an option if the drugs became available again, which has since happened.

A secrecy law passed last year — which keeps everything about lethal injection drugs secret, including who’s selling them — had the intended result. In September, Stirling informed the court the prisons agency was able to buy phenobarbital, making death by lethal injection an option again.

In a hearing before the high court in February, an attorney for the inmates said justices still needed to decide whether the electric chair and firing squad should even be a choice.

On Wednesday, attorney John Blume said he and his colleagues are still reviewing the opinions and determining their options.

“We are obviously disappointed” by the majority’s conclusion, he wrote in an email.

Like McMaster, Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey applauded justices’ ruling.

“Senate Republicans stood up for victims’ families and crafted this law to ensure that, while justice may have been delayed, it will not be denied,” said the Edgefield Republican.

It was the Senate that added the firing squad as a possibility during floor debate. But it was a Democrat who made the recommendation , which the chamber’s majority Republicans adopted.

Columbia Sen. Dick Harpootlian, a former solicitor and former state Democratic Party chairman, argued the firing squad would be a quicker, more humane way to die than either electrocution or lethal injection.

Richard Moore , the first inmate forced to choose in 2022 between electrocution or firing squad, chose the latter, while still disputing the legality of both methods. That decision became moot when the court put his execution on hold amid the legal challenges.

Moore, now 59, was sentenced to death in 2001 after being convicted of murder, assault with intent to kill, armed robbery and a firearms violation stemming from a botched robbery at a Spartanburg County convenient store. Moore, who entered the store unarmed, maintains he fatally shot the clerk in self-defense.

The other inmates who have exhausted their appeals:

• Brag Sigmon, 66 , was convicted in 2002 of beating his ex-girlfriend’s parents to death with a baseball bat a year earlier after she ended their three-year relationship and moved back home.

• Freddie Owens, 46 , has been sentenced to death three times since his initial conviction for shooting a convenience store clerk in the head during a 1997 robbery spree because she couldn’t open a safe.

• Mikal Mahdi, 41 , whose four-state crime spree in 2004, when he lived in Virginia, included killing an off-duty officer in South Carolina, lighting his body on fire and stealing his police-issued truck and gun. That happened after he fatally shot a store clerk in North Carolina.

• Marion Bowman Jr., 44 , was sentenced in 2002 for fatally shooting a 21-year-old mother and former high school classmate, putting her body in her trunk and setting the vehicle on fire.

They are among 33 men — 16 Black, 17 white — on South Carolina’s list of inmates sentenced to death, though one of them is on death row in California for crimes committed in that state.

The state director of the American Civil Liberties Union said any form of execution represents cruel and unusual punishment.

“The death penalty has no place in our society or under our Constitution,” said Jace Woodrum, director of the ACLU’s South Carolina branch. It “not only fails to make us safer but raises the possibility of the state killing innocent people in our name. In addition, South Carolina’s ‘shield law’ adds a layer of secrecy about the methodology of killing, making future executions less transparent than ever before.”

The last execution in South Caroline was in 2011 by lethal injection.

No one has been sentenced to death in South Carolina since 2019, partially because the state has been unable to carry out the sentence. The oldest conviction for an inmate on death row dates to 1983.

SC Daily Gazette reporter Skylar Laird contributed to this report.