South Carolina bill would allow firing squads to trim death row backlog

(The Center Square) – Death row inmates can choose between lethal injection or the electric chair as their way of execution under South Carolina law.

If an inmate chooses lethal injection, however, a provision in South Carolina law says the state cannot force the condemned to die by electrocution if the deadly chemical cocktail is unavailable.

Proposed Senate and House bills would remove that provision and allow the state to proceed with executions of death row inmates who selected lethal injection even if the shots cannot be administered.

The Senate adopted Senate Bill 200, sponsored by Sen. Greg Hembree, R-Little River, in a 32-11 vote Wednesday. It now goes to the House, where it was referred Thursday to a hearing before the House Judiciary Committee.

The House Judiciary Committee already has endorsed SB 200’s House companion, House Bill 3755, which has 27 cosponsors.

The Senate measure the House panel will review, however, was tweaked Wednesday, when senators agreed to add an alternative method of execution to the electric chair for inmates to choose if lethal injections aren’t available: the firing squad.

The reason for the measures: South Carolina has been unable to purchase sodium thiopental, an anesthetic used in the three-drug lethal injection cocktail, for at least five years amid a nationwide shortage that has stymied death penalties in the 28 states with the death penalty. South Carolina’s last execution was 2011.

South Carolina is one of eight states, all in the South, that use the electric chair to execute the condemned, last fatally electrocuting a death row inmate in 2008.

Of the eight states, all but Florida and Kentucky allow the electric chair to be considered, but not mandated, if lethal injections are unavailable, according to the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC).

That clause has delayed at least two South Carolina executions and could foster delays in carrying out sentences for 35 other death row prisoners, according to the South Carolina Department of Corrections (DOC).

If adopted, South Carolina would join Utah, Oklahoma and Mississippi in allowing death row inmates to choose firing squads as a method of execution.

During a Tuesday floor debate that preceded Wednesday’s vote, proponents argued the state is obligated to carry out sentences handed down by juries and courts.

“For several years, as most of you know, South Carolina has not been able to carry out executions,” Hembree said. “Families are waiting. Victims are waiting. The state is waiting.”

Hembree said firing squads are more humane than the electric chair, a statement that evoked unexpected concurrence from death penalty foe Sen. Dick Harpootlian, D-Richland, who voted in favor of the amendment.

“They’re dead instantly,” he said. “The actual pain and suffering of death, it’s actually the least painful and the least suffering of any manner of death.”

Opposition came from Democrats who object overall to the death penalty, which some say is immoral, many say is inequitably applied and all claim to be racist, noting of 37 inmates on South Carolina’s death row, 19 are Black. That is more than half the condemned from a group that constitutes a quarter of the state’s population.

The Roman Catholic Diocese of Charleston lamented SB 200’s passage in a statement.

“It is long past time to abolish the death penalty in South Carolina, not to find new ways to execute our brothers and sisters, including by firing squad,” Diocese spokesperson Maria Aselage said. “Every person is created in the likeness of God; their lives should be protected from the time of conception until natural death.”

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