South Carolina Gives Death Row Inmates a Choice: Electric Chair or Firing Squad

COLUMBIA, S.C. (CN) — Aiming to end a decade-long pause in executions, South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster signed a bill Friday that requires death row inmates to choose between the electric chair and a firing squad if lethal injection is not an available option.

Those sentenced to death in South Carolina were previously given the choice between lethal injection and the electric chair located in the death chamber of the Broad River Correctional Institution in Columbia.

Inmates who did not choose the electric chair were automatically scheduled for lethal injection. But due to a lack of drugs needed to carry out the procedure, in part due to some pharmaceutical companies refusing to fill the orders, executions came to a halt in South Carolina for about a decade. The state's last batch of lethal injection drugs reportedly expired in 2013.

The new law retains lethal injection as the primary method of execution and requires it be used if the state has the necessary drugs. However, if they're not available, the condemned are forced to choose between the 109-year-old electric chair and a firing squad that is currently being developed. 

“This weekend, I signed legislation into law that will allow the state to carry out a death sentence," McMaster, a Republican, wrote Monday on Twitter. "The families and loved ones of victims are owed closure and justice by law. Now, we can provide it."

According to the Death Penalty Information Center, 24 states currently impose the death penalty for capital crimes.

The only other states to allow death by firing squad are Mississippi, Oklahoma and Utah. Prison officials in South Carolina are researching how firing squads operate in those three states, according to the Associated Press, but it is unclear when the Palmetto State's firing squad will be ready and when executions will resume.

The legislation received pushback from civil and human rights groups when it was approved by the state Senate last Wednesday, including from the American Civil Liberties Union of South Carolina. 

Frank Knaack, the organization’s executive director, said the law only serves to restart state executions and warned that it could disproportionately affect marginalized communities. He noted Black people make up more than half of the state’s death row inmates despite being only 27% of South Carolina’s population.

He also said those convicted of a capital offense are more likely to receive a death sentence if the victim was white rather than Black.

“Despite clear and incontrovertible evidence that South Carolina’s capital punishment system is racist, arbitrary, and error-prone, today our legislators passed a bill to keep the state’s machinery of death moving. The death penalty is modern-day lynching. It must be abolished,” Knaack said in a statement last week.

According to the South Carolina Department of Corrections, the state has carried over 284 executions since Aug. 6, 1912. Before that date, executions were carried out by counties in the form of hangings.

Of the 284 individuals executed by the state, 75 were white and 209 were Black. 

Ngozi Ndulue, director of the Death Penalty Information Center, which published a report last year highlighting racial disparities in capital punishment, says the death penalty has been used to “enforce racial hierarchies throughout United States history.” The group claims South Carolina is one of only eight states that can still electrocute death row inmates.

Civil rights advocates, including members of a local chapter of the National Action Network, gathered at the South Carolina State House last week to urge McMaster not to sign the legislation.

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