South Carolina’s top court rules state death penalty including firing squad is legal
COLUMBIA, SC — The South Carolina High Council ruled Wednesday that the death penalty, which now includes a firing squad, lethal injection and the electric chair, is legal in the state.
All five justices agreed with at least part of the ruling, opening the door to resuming executions in a state that hasn’t put inmates to death since 2011. But two justices said they didn’t believe a firing squad was a legal way to kill an inmate, and one said the electric chair was cruel and unusual punishment.
The death penalty law is legal because the choice among the three methods of execution is not aimed at inflicting pain, but rather gives the impression that lawmakers are genuinely opposed to inflicting pain and to making the death penalty as humane as possible, Justice John Few wrote in the majority opinion.
There may be eight prisoners who have been denied traditional appeals. It is unclear when executions will resume or whether lawyers for death row inmates will be able to appeal the verdict.
Since the death penalty was reinstated in the United States in 1976, South Carolina has executed 43 prisoners. Nearly all have chosen lethal injection.
“Freedom of choice cannot be considered cruel because the convicted prisoner can choose to have the state use the method that he and his lawyers believe will cause him the least pain,” Few wrote.
South Carolina has not carried out an execution since 2011. The state’s supply of lethal injection drugs had expired, and no pharmaceutical company would sell any more if they were made public.
Lawmakers authorized the state to establish a firing squad in 2021 to give prisoners a choice between it and the old electric chair. Inmates sued, saying both options were cruel and unusual punishments prohibited by the Constitution.
In the spring of 2023, the Legislature passed a shield law to keep suppliers of lethal injection drugs secret and the state announced in september It contained the anesthetic pentobarbital and changed the method of execution by lethal injection from three drugs to just one.
The Supreme Court allowed the inmates to argue that the shield law was too secretive because it failed to disclose information about the strength, purity and stabilization of the lethal injection drugs.
South Carolina has 32 inmates on death row. Four have filed lawsuits, but four others have lost their appeals, though two must undergo competency hearings before they can be executed, according to Justice 360, a group that describes itself as advocating for prisoners and for fairness and transparency in capital punishment and other major criminal cases.
The state argued in its February Supreme Court submissions that lethal injection, electrocution and firing squad all fit within existing death penalty protocols. “Courts have never held that death must be instantaneous or painless,” wrote Grayson Lambert, an attorney for Gov. Henry McMaster’s office.
However, lawyers for the prisoners asked the justices to agree with Judge Jocelyn Newman, who banned executions by electric chair or firing squad.
She quoted the prisoners’ experts, who testified in a lawsuit that prisoners would feel terrible pain, whether their bodies were being ‘cooked’ by 2,000 volts of electricity in the chair, built in 1912, or their hearts were stopped by bullets – assuming the three gunmen had their sights set on them – from the yet-to-be-used firing squad.
As for the shield law, the prisoner’s lawyers said they needed to know if there was a regular supplier of the drug, since it normally only has a shelf life of 45 days. They also wanted to know what guidelines were in place to test the drug and make sure it was what the seller claimed.
Too weak and prisoners can suffer without dying. Too strong and the drug molecules can form small clumps that cause intense pain when injected, according to court documents.
“No prisoner in the country has ever been put to death with so little transparency about how he or she would be executed,” wrote Justice 360 attorney Lindsey Vann.
Attorneys for the inmates told the judges in February that lethal injections appear to be legal if they follow proper protocols and convicts are informed about the drug in a manner consistent with what other states and the federal government use.
South Carolina averaged three executions per year and had more than 60 inmates on death row when the last execution was carried out in 2011. Since then, successful appeals and natural deaths have reduced the number of executions. to 32.
Prosecutors have sent just three new inmates to death row in the past 13 years. Faced with rising costs, a shortage of lethal injection drugs and more powerful defensesthey choose to accept a guilty plea and life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.