South Carolina executed a double-murderer Friday afternoon. Brad Sigmon, 67, and a 23-year resident of death row, was put to death for the baseball bat murders of his ex-girlfriend’s parents. He’d planned to kidnap her and take her away for a romantic weekend that was to culminate in a murder-suicide.
Sigmon was strapped to a chair in South Carolina’s execution chamber, which is conveniently outfitted with an electric chair (last used by James Earl Reed in 2008) and a lethal injection apparatus. A black hood was placed over his head and chest, a white target with a red bull’s eye pinned to his chest, and three Department of Corrections employees using .308 rifles fired a single volley of 110-grain Winchester Hornady Tactical Application Police ammunition from a distance of 15 feet into Sigmon. Death was instantaneous.
The last firing squad execution was that of Ronnie Gardner in Utah, who was killed in June of 2010.
For more info on how this round works, the video below is cued to the ballistic gel test.
I’m pretty agnostic on the issue of capital punishment as it is currently administered. Warehousing men on death row for nearly forty years and killing them in their 70s doesn’t make much sense to me. I also don’t trust a judicial system where what seems like a large number of prosecutors think sending a man to his death with contrived evidence is just how the game is played.
Just as damaging to the use of the death penalty as the legal gamesmanship are the attempts by state legislatures to sanitize and medicalize the means of punishment. Electrocution was introduced to prevent botched hangings. The electric chair brought its own special horrors and misadventures, which led to the gas chamber. The gas chamber was not the panacea humanitarians envisioned, with some horrific episodes traumatizing staff and witnesses. Lethal injection was introduced to make everything nice and clean, but it also required the recruitment of medical personnel into the process. The use of medical personnel and drugs licensed by the FDA as “safe and effective” opened up a brand new collateral line of attack on the means of carrying out capital punishment. State governments were forced to act like a junkie seeking a fix to buy legal drugs from distributors who did not wish for the their products to be used to kill prisoners. Last year, we witnessed another step along this route: using nitrogen hypoxia. It was sufficiently problematic that it will probably not become common.
In response to the attacks on lethal injection, South Carolina passed a law giving condemned prisoners a Let’s Make a Deal choice of three doors, or exits, if you will: lethal injection, electric chair, and firing squad. If a prisoner refused to choose, he gets the electric chair by default. But the lines of attack on the firing squad are already visible:
The shootings aren’t always clean affairs. Autopsy photos of an inmate executed by firing squad in Utah reviewed by The Post and Courier showed the deceased with several gaping wounds, only one of which appeared to hit their heart.
If we are worried about postmortem aesthetics, maybe we shouldn’t be in the capital punishment business.
The firing squad has a lot to recommend it. It doesn’t require specialized equipment or the involvement of medical personnel. It is inexpensive. It is not open to challenge on Eighth Amendment grounds because of its long history. It is also very hard to botch a firing squad execution. The Death Penalty Information Center finds zero botched firing squad executions in the 34 that have been carried out since 1890. That’s not to say it can’t be done. On May 16, 1897, Wllace Wilkerson was executed in Provo, Utah. The firing squad missed their mark, and it took Wilkerson 27 minutes to bleed out while the authorities pondered the situation.
If we are going to be serious about the death penalty, it needs to be perceived as fair, and that means that prosecutors must be scrupulously honest in proving guilt, and they must face multiple decades in prison if they cheat. We also need to get back to basics. The human body is resilient. It isn’t supposed to be easy to kill us. Rather than searching for a method that removes the fear of execution from the condemned and the horror of the spectacle from the witnesses, maybe we should just focus on stuff that works.
