'Barbaric': Inmate chooses death by firing squad for execution in South Carolina next month
In South Carolina, inmates can choose between lethal injection, the firing squad or the electric chair. If they don't make a choice, the default is the electric chair.
A South Carolina death row inmate has chosen to die by firing squad in what would be the first such execution in the state in modern history and the fourth in the U.S. since 1977.
Brad Keith Sigmon, 67, is set to be executed on March 7 for the 2001 beating deaths of his ex-girlfriend's parents, David and Gladys Larke.
In South Carolina, inmates can choose between lethal injection, the firing squad or the electric chair. If they don't make a choice, the default is the electric chair.
Sigmon's attorney said Friday that his client had no choice but to elect "the least torturous way to die," raising questions about recent "monstrous" lethal injections in the state and saying that the state has an "ancient electric chair, which would burn and cook him alive."
"There is no justice here," Sigmon's attorney, Gerald “Bo” King, said in a statement. "Everything about this barbaric, state-sanctioned atrocity − from the choice to the method itself − is abjectly cruel. We should not just be horrified – we should be furious.”
The South Carolina Attorney General's Office, which represents the state in death penalty cases, did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Paste BN on Friday.
Here's what you need to know about the upcoming execution, the crime and Sigmon.
South Carolina corrections department 'ready to carry out' firing squad execution
In a statement to Paste BN on Friday, the South Carolina Department of Corrections said the Broad River Correctional Institute has been renovated to be able to conduct firing squads and a set of protocols put in place for the method.
"The department is ready to carry out an order of execution by firing squad," the agency said.
The inmate will sit restrained in a metal chair in the corner of a room shared by the state's electric chair, "which can't be moved," the department said in its firing squad protocols.
There will be three members to the firing squad team − voluntary corrections staff − and all will stand behind a wall with loaded rifles 15 feet from the inmate. The wall will have an opening that that won't be visible from the witness room.
"The inmate will be strapped into the chair, and a hood will be placed over his head," the department said. "A small aim point will be placed over his heart by a member of the execution team. After the warden reads the execution order, the team will fire. After the shots, a doctor will examine the inmate. After the inmate is declared dead, the curtain will be drawn and witnesses escorted out."Witnesses to the execution, which typically involve family members of both the inmate and victim, members of the news media, attorneys, and prison staff "will see the right-side profile of the inmate."
The department said that bullet-resistant glass has been installed between the death chamber and the witness room.
The modern history of firing squad executions in the US
Four other states − Mississippi, Utah, Oklahoma, and Idaho − have legalized firing squads as an execution method, most recently Idaho in 2023.
The last inmate in the U.S. to be killed by firing squad was in 2010, when Utah executed Ronnie Lee Gardner for killing a man during a robbery. Both other firing squad executions were in Utah, Gary Mark Gilmore in 1977 and John Albert Taylor in 1996.
Among the witnesses to Gardner’s execution was an Associated Press reporter who said that five volunteer prison staff members fired at him from about 25 feet away with .30-caliber rifles, aiming at a target pinned over his chest as he sat in a chair. One of the rifles had a blank so none of the volunteers knew whether they fired a fatal bullet, AP reported.
Gardner was pronounced dead two minutes after the shots rang out, faster than both lethal injection or nitrogen gas.
As lethal injection drugs have become harder to obtain, states with the death penalty have looked to expand their methods to things like firing squads and nitrogen gas, which was first used in the U.S. in January 2024 in Alabama with the execution of Kenneth Eugene Smith. A spiritual adviser who witnessed it described it as "torture" while the state maintains it is "constitutional and effective."
What was Brad Keith Sigmon convicted of?
On April 27, 2001, Sigmon showed up at his ex-girlfriend's parent's house with a plan that he hatched while doing crack cocaine the night before: He was going to tie up David and Gladys Larke and kidnap his ex, he told police.
Instead, he snapped and beat the couple to death with a baseball bat, hitting each of them nine times, according to police and a medical examiner's report. Sigmon kidnapped his ex-girlfriend in his car but she jumped out of the moving vehicle and was able to escape, though Sigmon shot her once before his gun ran out of bullets, according to court records.
Sigmon has always admitted to being guilty of the crimes, even telling jurors at his 2002 trial that he had no excuse for what he did, saying that when his ex-girlfriend fell out of love with him and began seeing another man, it set him off, according to reporting at the time by the Greenville News, part of the Paste BN Network.
“Do I deserve to die? I probably do," he told jurors. "I don’t want to die. It would kill my mom, my brothers and my sisters … I just want to live for my family’s sake.”
Jurors also heard from family members of David and Gladys Larke, who were 62 and 59, respectively, when they were killed. Their adult children wept on the witness stand and spoke of their devastation.
"I am who I am because of him (my dad) and my mom," Darrell Larke said, according to the Greenville News. "He taught me how to fish, how to hunt, how to enjoy life, how to be responsible."
Arguments from Brad Keith Sigmon's attorneys
Sigmon's attorneys have been arguing in court documents that he deserves a reprieve because he was severely mentally ill and experienced a "psychotic break" during the crime − information the jury that convicted him never got, they said in recent court filings.
"Mr. Sigmon’s jury, and this Court, were deprived of powerfully mitigating evidence of his severe, inherited mental illness, which, at the time of his crimes and trial, had combined with his childhood trauma and drug abuse to push himinto psychosis," they said. "Executing Brad Sigmon would be fundamentally unfair."
They have also argued that the lethal injection method the state has been relying on is not as free of torture as the state says it is.
While the state Attorney General's Office didn't respond to Paste BN for comment Friday, trial prosecutors in 2002 told jurors that Sigmon's crime showed "a depravity of spirit."
"When you hear 'mercy,' I want to remind you that mercy belongs to those who deserve it," prosecutor Bob Ariail said. "Ask yourselves, in your minds, 'What mercy did you give Gladys and David Larke?' These were two living and breathing human beings who had to live through the most horrific death I can imagine."