Letting inmates choose to be executed by a firing squad is OK, South Carolina’s top court ruled on July 31.
The justice also said there is “absolutely no evidence the citizens of South Carolina in any way ever rejected the firing squad.”
Lethal injection has been the main execution method in South Carolina since 1995. A law signed by South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster in 2021 made electrocution the primary execution method and listed two alternatives, lethal injection and death by firing squad. The law requires that death row inmates choose their methods of execution.
Protocols for the firing squad were developed in 2022, state officials said.
Richard Bernard Moore, a death row inmate, chose death by firing squad due to the lack of chemicals for lethal injections and because he opposed electrocution.
“I believe this election is forcing me to choose between two unconstitutional methods of execution, and I do not intend to waive any challenges to electrocution or firing squad by making an election,” he said at the time.
But as officials prepared to execute the prisoner, the courts paused the execution as they reviewed whether the execution method was constitutional.
Convicts sentenced to death argued in the case that both electrocution and firing squad are unconstitutional because they are cruel and unusual.
But in addition to not being cruel, the methods are not unusual, the majority said on Wednesday.
The options do not violate the state Constitution’s prohibition on unusual punishment because that prohibition “was not intended to inhibit innovative efforts to make execution less inhumane,” Few said.
That means the law is constitutional, he said.
The decision reverses a lower court ruling that found the law violated the South Carolina Constitution and blocked officials from carrying out executions via electrocution and firing squad.
Chief South Carolina Supreme Court Justice Donald Beatty concurred in part and dissented in part. He said that parts of the law are constitutional but that making electrocution and firing squad execution available to death row inmates violates the state’s ban on cruel, corporal, and unusual punishment.
“In my view, the circuit court did not err in finding the firing squad has been—and remains—an unusual method of execution in the United States,” Beatty wrote, pointing out that no person has been executed by firing squad since South Carolina became a state in 1788 and that execution by firing squad is only available in four other states.
Because most states also do not allow electrocution as an execution method, that method is unusual, the justice added.
Justice John Kittredge also said he agreed with some of the majority opinion but that he would find the firing squad execution method unusual, or violative of the state constitution.
“The firing squad has been an available method of execution since the dawn of our state, with the first documented firing-squad execution occurring in colonial America in 1608,” he wrote. “Nonetheless, until now, South Carolina has never authorized—let alone used—the firing squad as a method of execution. Necessarily, our state’s deliberate, centuries-long failure to adopt firing-squad executions renders that method of execution ‘unusual’ in the constitutional sense.”
“This decision is another step in ensuring that lawful sentences can be duly enforced,” the governor said in a statement, “and the families and loved ones of the victims receive the closure and justice they have long awaited.”
