South Carolina performs prisoners by shooting a team

The state of South Carolina executed a prisoner Friday evening with a shooting team, an extremely rare method that had not been used in the United States since 2010.

The detainee, Brad Sigmon, 67, was found guilty of having killed the parents of his ex-girlfriend, David and Gladys Larke, with a baseball bat in 2001.

A judge had ordered Mr. Sigmon to choose from three methods of execution: lethal injection, electrocution or shooting. His lawyer, Gerald King, said that Mr. Sigmon had chosen to be killed because he had concerns about the Latal injection process of South Carolina.

Mr. Sigmon is the first detainee to be killed in this way in the history of the state. Surveys show that a majority of Americans promote the death penalty, but many consider the shooting team as an archaic form of justice. But as lethal injection drugs have become more difficult to obtain and have sometimes led to botched executions, several states have recently legalized the shooting teams as a method of execution.

Utah had previously been the only state to use a shooting team in modern times; He did it in 2010, 1996 and 1977.

Mr. Sigmon was executed in the death chamber of the Broad River Correctional Institution of Columbia, SC, the state capital.