COLUMBIA, S.C. — South Carolina prison officials told death row inmate Richard Moore on Tuesday that he could choose between a firing squad, the electric chair and lethal injection for his life. Execution on November 1.
State law gives Moore until Oct. 18 to decide or face electrocution. His execution would mark the event second in South Carolina after a 13-year hiatus due to the state’s failure to obtain a drug needed for lethal injection.
Moore, 59, faces the death penalty for the September 1999 shooting of store clerk James Mahoney. Moore entered the Spartanburg County store unarmed to rob it and the two ended up in a shootout after Moore was able to grab one of Mahoney’s guns. Moore was wounded, while Mahoney died from a bullet to the chest.
He appeals to the US Supreme Court to halt the execution. Moore, who is black, is the only man on South Carolina’s death row convicted by a jury that did not include African Americans, his lawyers said. If executed, he would also be the first person put to death in the state in modern times who was initially unarmed and then defended himself when threatened with a weapon, they said.
South Carolina Corrections Director Bryan Stirling said the state’s electric chair was tested last month, the firing squad has the ammunition and training and the state lethal injection drug was tested and found clean by state crime lab technicians, according to a certified letter sent to Moore.
Freddie Owens was put to death by lethal injection in South Carolina on September 20, after a shield law was passed last year allowing the state to obtain a drug needed for lethal injection. Before the privacy measure went into effect, companies refused to sell the drug.
Leading up to his execution, Owens asked the state Supreme Court to release more information about the pentobarbital that would be used to kill him. The judges ruled that Stirling had disclosed enough when he told Owens, just as he did Moore in Tuesday’s letter, that the drug was pure, stable and potent enough to carry out the execution.
Prison officials also told Moore that was from the state electric chairBuilt in 1912, it was tested on September 3 and found to be in good working order. They did not provide details about those tests.
The firing squadauthorized by a 2021 law, has the weapons, ammunition and training it needs, Stirling wrote. Three volunteers are trained to shoot at a target placed on the heart from a distance of 4.6 meters.
Moore plans to ask Gov. Henry McMaster, a Republican, for mercy and reduce his sentence to life without parole. No South Carolina governor has ever done that granted leniency in the modern era of capital punishment.
Moore has no violations on his record and has offered to help rehabilitate other inmates while he is behind bars.
South Carolina has put 44 prisoners to death since the US renewed the death penalty in 1976. In the early 2000s, an average of three executions were carried out per year. Nine states have put more prisoners to death.
But since the accidental execution pause, South Carolina’s death row population has declined. At the beginning of 2011, the state had 63 convicted prisoners. Currently there are 31. About 20 prisoners have been arrested. taken off death row and received several prison sentences after successful appeals. Others died of natural causes.