U.S. President Donald Trump walks throughout the South Garden to board Marine One on the White Home on March 07, 2025 in Washington, DC. (Picture by Kayla Bartkowski / GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA / Getty Photos through AFP)
A South Carolina man convicted of murdering his ex-girlfriend’s dad and mom was put to loss of life by firing squad on Friday within the first such execution in the USA in 15 years, jail officers stated.
Brad Sigmon, 67, who confessed to murdering David and Gladys Larke in 2001 with a baseball bat, was executed by a three-person firing squad on the Broad River Correctional Establishment within the state capital Columbia, jail spokeswoman Chrysti Shain stated.
Sigmon had requested the Supreme Court docket for a last-minute keep of execution but it surely was denied.
South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster additionally rejected his attraction for clemency.
Sigmon had a selection between deadly injection, the firing squad or the electrical chair as his method of execution.
Gerald “Bo” King, one in all his attorneys, stated Sigmon had chosen the firing squad after being positioned in an “inconceivable” place, compelled to make an “abjectly merciless” determination about how he would die.
“Until he elected deadly injection or the firing squad, he would die in South Carolina’s historical electrical chair, which might burn and prepare dinner him alive,” King stated.
“However the various is simply as monstrous,” he stated. “If he selected deadly injection, he risked the extended loss of life suffered by all three of the lads South Carolina has executed since September.”
The final firing squad execution in the USA was in Utah in 2010.
Two others have additionally been carried out by firing squad within the western state — in 1996 and in 1977.
The 1977 execution of convicted assassin Gary Gilmore was the idea for the 1979 e book “The Executioner’s Music” by Norman Mailer.
The overwhelming majority of US executions have been accomplished by deadly injection for the reason that Supreme Court docket reinstated the loss of life penalty in 1976.
Alabama has carried out 4 executions lately utilizing nitrogen fuel, which has been denounced by UN consultants as merciless and inhumane.
The execution is carried out by pumping nitrogen fuel right into a face masks, inflicting the prisoner to suffocate.
Three different states — Idaho, Mississippi and Oklahoma — have joined South Carolina and Utah in authorizing the usage of firing squads.
There have been six executions in the USA this 12 months, following 25 final 12 months.
The loss of life penalty has been abolished in 23 of the 50 US states, whereas three others — California, Oregon and Pennsylvania — have moratoriums in place.
Arizona, Ohio and Tennessee had paused executions however lately introduced plans to renew them.
President Donald Trump is a proponent of capital punishment and on his first day in workplace, he referred to as for an enlargement of its use “for the vilest crimes.”
