South Carolina can now execute inmates by firing squad

The South Carolina Department of Corrections has officially approved death by firing squad as an option for condemned inmates.

The policy comes into effect pursuant to a state law passed last year in light of the difficulty the state was having in procuring the cocktail of drugs needed to carry out lethal injections.

While the new law makes the electric chair the primary means of execution, it gives inmates the option to choose death by firing squad or lethal injection instead.

The department notified state Attorney General Alan Wilson Friday that it is now capable of carrying out firing squad executions, having completed the necessary renovations to the state’s death chamber, according to a news release.  

According to the state department of corrections, there are 35 individuals on death row, although there are no scheduled executions on the docket at present. South Carolina last executed an inmate in 2011.

While executions by firing squad are rare, they have been requested, unsuccessfully, by condemned prisoners in other states in the past few years.

In 2021, the Supreme Court rejected a Missouri prisoner’s request to be executed by firing squad. That inmate, Ernest Johnson, argued that lethal injection would cause him severe seizures. 

In her dissent in the matter, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said that “Missouri is now free to execute Johnson in a manner that, at this stage of the litigation, we must assume will be akin to torture given his unique medical condition.”

The Supreme Court denied a similar request from an Alabama prisoner in 2017. 

Donald Grant, a former death row inmate in Oklahoma, was executed by lethal injection in January after his request to die by firing squad was rejected. It was just the state’s second execution since 2014. 

Oklahoma paused executions and reassessed its methods after Clayton Lockett died of a heart attack more than an hour after being restrained in 2014. 

The state’s investigation concluded that the viability of the IV access point was the most significant factor in the difficulty of administering the drugs. 

According to at least one expert, firing squads afford an alternative that is much less likely to be botched in its execution.

“They are more efficient,” Fordham University law professor and death penalty scholar Deborah Denno said on “Dan Abrams Live” in January. “They’re also more certain.”

Utah is the only state to use a firing squad in the last 50 years. The state executed Ronnie Lee Gardner by firing squad in 2010. 

“Of the three modern firing squad executions that have taken place and the last, as you said, was in 2010, they’ve gone off and seemingly flawlessly,” Ms. Denno said, according to “Dan Abrams Live.”