As states struggle with different methods to carry out executions that are not characterized by extreme cruelty, South Carolina executed Brad Sigmon by firing squad today.
A History of Cruelty
Hanging was the prevalent execution method throughout most of American history. Ideally, the noose severed the spinal column, resulting in almost instant death. But as Austin Sarat, a distinguished professor and expert on execution methods, explained in the Caledonian Record, hanging often resulted in a slow death by strangulation—and sometimes gruesome beheadings.
By the end of the 19th century, executioners began to adopt the electric chair as a “humane alternative” to hanging that would result in death even “before the nerves can communicate a sense of shock.”
The first electrocution—the 1890 execution of William Kemmler—was horribly botched. The execution chamber “filled with the smell of burning flesh” and the “historic bungle” was roundly condemned as “disgusting, sickening and inhuman.” Electrocutions nonetheless became a leading execution method until the 1990s, when two condemned people caught fire in Florida’s electric chair.
Alternatives to electrocution included the gas chamber, which was supposed to painlessly kill by releasing poison gas into an airtight chamber. But executions by lethal gas were also described by many observers as horrific. Individuals subjected to poisonous gas suffered terribly, and by the end of the 20th century, the gas chamber was abandoned.
Lethal injection emerged as the next supposedly quick, painless, and humane method, and became the most widely used method in the modern death penalty era. The Death Penalty Information Center reports that 1,428 people have been executed by lethal injection since 1976, compared with 163 by electrocution.
Experts now say lethal injection is the most botched method of all. Executioners have struggled, sometimes for hours, to insert intravenous lines for administering lethal drugs, at times resorting to bloody and painful cut-down procedures. Execution teams have failed to properly place IV lines and failed to correctly administer anesthesia, resulting in an excruciatingly painful and torturous death.
In 2020, NPR reported that its review of more than 200 autopsy reports from executions in nine states between 1990 and 2019 revealed evidence of pulmonary edema in 84% of the cases. Pulmonary edema occurs when the lungs fill up with fluid, and it can induce the feeling of suffocation or drowning.
Earlier this year, the Justice Department rescinded the federal lethal injection protocol after its review raised serious concerns about whether lethal injections cause unnecessary pain and suffering.
In response, states have resorted to other methods, including reviving the electric chair and adopting a new method—nitrogen suffocation.
With the worst record of any state for botched executions, Alabama carried out the first execution in the world using nitrogen gas in 2024.
State officials assured the courts and the public that Kenny Smith would lose consciousness “almost immediately” and die within a few minutes, but the execution took over 30 minutes, during which witnesses reported that Mr. Smith writhed in pain, “his whole body and head violently jerking back and forth for several minutes,” followed by “heaving and retching inside the mask.”
Alabama has now suffocated four people to death using nitrogen gas, with witnesses at each execution reporting clear signs of distress and suffering.
South Carolina Requires “Choice” Between Barbaric Methods
South Carolina responded to its problems with lethal injection executions by requiring people with death sentences to participate in their own executions by choosing between painful, inhumane methods—lethal injection, electrocution, or firing squad.
Firing squad is the least often used method in U.S. history, according to Mr. Sarat. Since 1976, only three people have been executed by firing squad. The last was Ronnie Lee Gardner in Utah in 2010.
In 2022, a South Carolina court ruled that the firing squad violates the state constitution, concluding that the method is both cruel and unusual. The court found that fewer than 1% of executions in the U.S. have been carried out by firing squad, with only 34 such executions since 1900—all but one of which were in Utah.
South Carolina has never used a firing squad to carry out an execution.
The history of the firing squad includes gruesome deaths when shooters missed their target, Mr. Sarat wrote. In 1951, four executioners all shot into the wrong side of Eliseo Mares’s chest, leaving him to die slowly from blood loss.
The South Carolina court found that the firing squad causes death by damaging the person’s heart and surrounding bone and tissue. This is extremely painful unless the person is unconscious, and experts testified the person is likely to be conscious for at least 10 seconds after impact—more if the ammunition does not fully incapacitate the heart.
The court concluded that the excruciating pain resulting from the gunshot wounds and broken bones constitutes “torture, a possibly lingering death, and pain beyond that necessary for the mere extinguishment of death, making the punishment cruel.”
And, because it clearly causes destruction to the human body, the firing squad also violates the state constitution’s bar against “corporal” punishments that mutilate the human body.
The South Carolina Supreme Court overruled the decision last year and allowed executions by all three of the state’s methods to proceed.
There Is No Humane Way to Kill
Examples abound of unnecessarily torturous executions—people catching fire while being electrocuted, being strangled during hangings, and lethal injections causing what Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor described as “sensations of drowning, suffocating, and being burned alive from the inside out.”
It is a fiction that there is a humane and responsible way for the State to kill its citizens. We have not adequately confronted the fact that killing people to show that killing is wrong is misguided.
Brad Sigmon has taken responsibility for the killings that resulted in his death sentence. A “hard worker and a loving brother who worked factory shifts as a teenager to make sure his brothers and sisters could eat,” Mr. Sigmon was suffering from undiagnosed mental illness that caused a psychotic break at the time of the crime, his attorney, Bo King, said in a statement. The jury that sentenced him did not know how severely mentally ill he was, his attorney said.
Mr. Sigmon has “transformed” in prison, becoming a repentant, God-loving man who serves as an informal chaplain to other men, Mr. King said. “He is a source of strength to his siblings and children. He is also in declining health and poses a danger to no one.” A model prisoner trusted by correctional staff, his lawyers said Mr. Sigmon works every day to atone for the killings.
At 67, Mr. Sigmon would be oldest person executed in South Carolina since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976.
After forcing an unconscionable choice between unreliable execution drugs, an “ancient electric chair, which would burn and cook him alive,” and the firing squad, the State plans to shoot Mr. Sigmon to death under conditions that firearms experts have called dangerous and unnecessarily risky to prison staff and witnesses.
“There is no justice here,” Mr. King said in a statement. “Everything about this barbaric, state-sanctioned atrocity—from the choice to the method itself—is abjectly cruel.”