South Carolina Death Row Inmate Becomes First to Be Executed by Firing Squad in 15 Years

The Supreme Court issued a brief order earlier Friday denying Brad Sigmon’s request to stay his execution.

Brad Sigmon in a file photo. South Carolina Department of Corrections via AP

South Carolina’s Brad Sigmon, 67, became the first U.S. prisoner to be executed by firing squad in 15 years.

He was pronounced dead at 6:08 p.m. Friday, about two minutes after three volunteer prison employees carried out the execution with rifles.

Sigmon was sentenced to death after admitting to killing his ex-girlfriend’s parents with a baseball bat in 2001. After their daughter refused to come back to him, his plot to kidnap her went awry. He told police he planned to take her on a romantic weekend and kill her and himself.

He faced the firing squad sitting in the prison’s death chamber wearing a black jumpsuit with a hood over his head and a bullseye over his chest.

Sigmon chose firing squad over the electric chair and lethal injection.

He had asked the court to review whether South Carolina violated his due process rights by withholding information about its lethal injections and forcing him to decide on a method of execution on a “compressed timeline.”

More specifically, he questioned whether the state violated his due process rights by not allowing him to make an informed decision about which method was less humane.

The circumstances, his brief said, “made it impossible for Brad Sigmon to assess which method is the more inhumane; to avoid the electric chair, he chose firing squad.”

The volunteers fired at the same time through openings in the wall 15 feet away—the length from the backboard to the free-throw line on a basketball court.

About a dozen witnesses watched behind bullet-resistant glass as Sigmon took the bullets and his final breath; they did not see the shooters. The witnesses included three family members of his victims.

In a closing statement, Sigmon called on his “fellow Christians” to help end the death penalty.

South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster denied a request to commute Sigmon’s sentence, and the Supreme Court issued a brief order on March 7 denying Sigmon’s request to stay his execution.

“The application for stay of execution of sentence of death presented to The Chief Justice and by him referred to the Court is denied,” the court’s order read. It also denied Sigmon’s petition for certiorari, which refers to a request for the justices to take up a case and address a particular legal question.

Earlier Appeals

The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision came after the state supreme court similarly rejected Sigmon’s appeal earlier this week. It said Sigmon hadn’t shown “exceptional circumstances warranting the issuance of a stay [of execution].”

In a brief to the U.S. Supreme Court, South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson said that Sigmon lacked standing.

“Because Sigmon will not be executed by lethal injection, he lacks standing to litigate his claim here, which is rooted in a demand for more information about lethal injection drugs,” Wilson’s brief read.

It also disputed that the state had denied Sigmon due process by withholding information about lethal injection. “The Director [of the South Carolina Department of Corrections] need not disclose anything specific or everything about the drugs,” the brief read. It pointed to a South Carolina Supreme Court decision stating that the director “must explain … how he determined the drugs were of sufficient “potency, purity, and stability” to carry out their intended purpose.”

Sigmon argued that requiring more information would secure his right to election of execution method. His brief suggested the Department of Corrections (SCDC) should “disclose the beyond use or expiration date of its drugs, the type and results of the tests performed on them, and their storage conditions.”

It added that “any problems with the reliability and effectiveness of the drugs themselves would necessarily be revealed and could be remediated.”

His brief to the court expressed concern about South Carolina’s executions, noting that three prisoners executed in 2024 weren’t pronounced dead until at least 20 minutes after the process began.

A declaration from Dr. David B. Waisel, an anesthesiologist at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, stated that “because a properly administered dose of effective pentobarbital should stop breathing within a minute,” such delay “indicates that a problem of some kind occurred.”

Wilson argued that Sigmon’s concerns about previous executions were “without merit.”

“We also know that lethal injection often requires more than ten minutes for an inmate to be declared dead,” he said. He added that a “second round of pentobarbital does not indicate that there is any issue with the drug or its administration. Rather, it’s simply the consequence of SCDC following its protocol when all electrical activity has not ceased within ten minutes.”

Executions in South Carolina, Utah

Since the United States resumed the death penalty in 1976, 46 other prisoners have been executed in South Carolina, seven by the electric chair and 39 by lethal injection.

The state experienced a 13-year pause in the practice beginning in the early 2000s. Sigmon became the third inmate to receive the death penalty after that pause ended last July, following Freddie Owens on Sept. 20, 2024, Richard Moore on Nov. 1, 2024, and Marion Bowman, Jr. on Jan. 31.

Only three other prisoners in the United States have been executed by firing squad since 1977. All of those executions occurred in Utah. Ronnie Lee Gardner was the last to face the firing squad, in 2010.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.