By Jeffrey Collins, Associated Press
Columbia, SC (AP) – A man from South Carolina found guilty of murder was executed by a shooting team on Friday, the first American prisoner to die by this method in 15 years.
Three employees of the volunteer prison used rifles to carry out the execution of Brad Sigmon, 67, who was declared dead at 6:08 p.m.
Sigmon killed the parents of his ex-girlfriend with a baseball bat in their Greenville County house in 2001 in a sloppy plot to kidnap their daughter. He told the police that he planned to take him for a romantic weekend, then kill her himself.
Sigmon’s lawyers said he had chosen the shooting team because the electric chair “would cuisine alive”, and he feared that a fatal injection of Pentobarbital in his veins sends a rush of liquid and blood in his lungs and drowned it.
The details of the lethal injection method of South Carolina are kept secret in South Carolina, and Sigmon asked in vain on Thursday that the Supreme Court of the State is suspended because of this.
Friday, Sigmon wore a black combination with a hood above his head and a white target with a red bullseye on his chest.
The employees of the armed prison held at 15 feet from the place where he was sitting in the death chamber of the state – the same distance as the panel is from the free throw line on a basketball court. Visible in the same small room was the unused electric chair of the state. The Gurney used to carry out deadly injections had been rolled.
The volunteers all fired at the same time thanks to the openings in a wall. They were not visible by a dozen witnesses in a room separated from the room by glass resistant to the balls. Sigmon made several heavy breaths during the two minutes that have passed from the moment when the hood was placed in the shots drawn.
The shots, which seemed to be drawn at the same time, made a strong and discordant blow which caused witnesses to start. His arms were briefly tense when he was shot down and the target was pressed from his chest. He seemed to give another breath or two with a red spot on his chest, and small amounts of fabric could be seen from the wound during these breaths.
A doctor came out about a minute later and examined Sigmon for 90 seconds before declaring him dead.
Witnesses included three members of the victims’ family, David and Gladys Larke. The lawyer and the spiritual advisor of Sigmon, a representative of the office of the Solicitor of the Pursuit, an investigator of the sheriff and three members of the media.
Sigmon made a declaration of closing which, according to him, was “a love and a call to my Christian colleagues to help us end the death penalty”.
The shooting team is a method of execution with a long and violent history in the United States and in the world. Death in a hail of bullets has been used to punish mutins and desertion in the armies, as border justice in the American old West and as a tool of terror and political repression in the former Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.
Since 1977, only three other prisoners in the United States have been executed by a shooting team. All were in Utah, more recently Ronnie Lee Gardner in 2010. Another Utah man, Ralph Menzies, could be the next one; He awaits the result of an audience in which his lawyers argued that his dementia makes him unfit for execution.
Friday, in South Carolina, a group of demonstrators holding signs with messages such as “all life is precious” and “execute justice and not people” gathered outside the prison before the execution of Sigmon.
Sigmon supporters and lawyers asked the Republican Governor Henry McMaster to return his sentence to life prison. They said he was a prisoner model of trust by the guards and worked every day to atone for killings and that he also committed the killings after succumbing to a serious mental illness.
But McMaster denied the advocacy of Clémence. No governor has ever switched from a death sentence to the state, where 46 other prisoners have been executed since the death penalty resumed in the United States in 1976. Seven died in the electrical president and 39 others by lethal injection.
In the early 2000s, South Carolina was among the most popular death penalty states, performing an average of three executions per year. But officials suspended the executions for 13 years, in part because they could not obtain fatal injection drugs.
The Supreme State Court paved the way to resume them in July. Freddie Owens was the first to death on September 20, after McMaster denied him the leniency. Richard Moore was executed on November 1 and Marion Bowman Jr. on January 31.
In the future, the court will authorize an execution every five weeks.
Southern Carolina now has 28 detainees in her death corridor, including two who have exhausted their calls and expect execution, most likely this spring. Only one man has been added to the death corridor in the last decade.
Before the executions were interrupted, more than 60 people were sentenced to death. Many of them have either their reduced perpetuity sorrows or died in prison.
Originally published:
California Daily Newspapers
