Protestors display outdoors the scheduled execution of South Carolina inmate Brad Sigmon, Friday, March 7, 2025, in Columbia, S.C.
Chris Carlson/AP
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Chris Carlson/AP
COLUMBIA, S.C. — A South Carolina man who killed his ex-girlfriend’s dad and mom with a baseball bat was executed by firing squad Friday, the primary U.S. prisoner in 15 years to die by that technique, which he noticed as preferable to the electrical chair or deadly injection.
Three volunteer jail workers used rifles to hold out the execution of Brad Sigmon, 67, who was pronounced useless at 6:08 p.m.
Sigmon killed David and Gladys Larke of their Greenville County residence in 2001 in a botched plot to kidnap their daughter. He informed police he deliberate to take her for a romantic weekend, then kill her and himself.
Sigmon’s attorneys mentioned he selected the firing squad as a result of the electrical chair would “prepare dinner him alive,” and he feared {that a} deadly injection of pentobarbital into his veins would ship a rush of fluid and blood into his lungs and drown him.
The main points of South Carolina’s deadly injection technique are saved secret in South Carolina, and Sigmon unsuccessfully requested the state Supreme Courtroom on Thursday to pause his execution due to that.
On Friday, Sigmon wore a black jumpsuit with a hood over his head and a white goal with a pink bullseye over his chest.
The armed jail workers stood 15 ft (4.6 meters) from the place he sat within the state’s demise chamber — the identical distance because the backboard is from the free-throw line on a basketball court docket. Seen in the identical small room was the state’s unused electrical chair. The gurney used to hold out deadly injections had been rolled away.
The volunteers all fired on the identical time by means of openings in a wall. They weren’t seen to a few dozen witnesses in a room separated from the chamber by bullet-resistant glass. Sigmon made a number of heavy breaths through the two minutes that elapsed from when the hood was positioned to the photographs being fired.
The photographs, which gave the impression of they had been fired on the identical time, made a loud, jarring bang that triggered witnesses to flinch. His arms briefly tensed when he was shot, and the goal was blasted off his chest. He appeared to present one other breath or two with a pink stain on his chest, and small quantities of tissue could possibly be seen from the wound throughout these breaths.
A physician got here out a few minute later and examined Sigmon for 90 seconds earlier than declaring him useless.
Witnesses included three relations of the Larkes. Additionally current had been Sigmon’s legal professional and non secular advisor, a consultant from the prosecuting solicitor’s workplace, a sheriff’s investigator and three members of the information media.
Sigmon’s lawyer learn a closing assertion that he mentioned was “one among love and a calling to my fellow Christians to assist us finish the demise penalty.”
Jail spokeswoman Chrysti Shain mentioned Sigmon’s final meal was 4 items of fried hen, inexperienced beans, mashed potatoes with gravy, biscuits, cheesecake and candy tea.
The firing squad is an execution technique with a protracted and violent historical past within the U.S. and all over the world. Demise in a hail of bullets has been used to punish mutinies and desertion in armies, as frontier justice in America’s Previous West and as a software of terror and political repression within the former Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.
Since 1977 solely three different prisoners within the U.S. have been executed by firing squad. All had been in Utah, most lately Ronnie Lee Gardner in 2010. One other Utah man, Ralph Menzies, could possibly be subsequent; he’s awaiting the results of a listening to during which his attorneys argued that his dementia makes him unfit for execution.
In South Carolina on Friday, a bunch of protesters holding indicators with messages akin to “All life is valuable” and “Execute justice not folks” gathered outdoors the jail earlier than Sigmon’s execution.
Supporters and attorneys for Sigmon requested Republican Gov. Henry McMaster to commute his sentence to life in jail. They mentioned he was a mannequin prisoner trusted by guards and labored daily to atone for the killings and in addition that he dedicated the killings after succumbing to extreme psychological sickness.
However McMaster denied the clemency plea. No governor has ever commuted a demise sentence within the state, the place 46 different prisoners have been executed for the reason that demise penalty resumed within the U.S. in 1976. Seven have died within the electrical chair and 39 others by deadly injection.
Gerald “Bo” King, chief of the capital habeas unit within the federal public defender’s workplace, mentioned Sigmon “used his ultimate assertion to name on his fellow folks of religion to finish the demise penalty and spare the lives of the 28 males nonetheless locked up on South Carolina’s demise row.”
“It’s unfathomable that, in 2025, South Carolina would execute one among its residents on this bloody spectacle,” King mentioned in a press release. “However South Carolina has ended the lifetime of a person who has devoted himself to his religion, and to ministry and repair to throughout him. Brad admitted his guilt at trial and shared his deep grief for his crimes together with his jury and, within the years since, with everybody who knew him.”
Within the early 2000s, South Carolina was among the many busiest demise penalty states, finishing up a median of three executions a 12 months. However officers suspended executions for 13 years, partly as a result of they had been unable to acquire deadly injection medicine.
The state Supreme Courtroom cleared the way in which to renew them in July. Freddie Owens was the primary to be put to demise, on Sept. 20, after McMaster denied him clemency. Richard Moore was executed on Nov. 1 and Marion Bowman Jr. on Jan. 31.
Going ahead the court docket will permit an execution each 5 weeks.
South Carolina now has 28 inmates on its demise row together with two who’ve exhausted their appeals and are awaiting execution, most definitely this spring. Only one man has been added to demise row up to now decade.
Earlier than executions had been paused, greater than 60 folks confronted demise sentences. A lot of these have both had their sentences lowered to life or died in jail.
