Brad Sigmon: Death row inmate executed by firing squad, 1st in US in 15 years
COLUMBIA, S.C. - A death row inmate on Friday in South Carolina was the first person to die by firing squad in the U.S. in 15 years.
Brad Sigmon, 67, said he chose to die by bullets because he considered the other methods offered by the state to be worse.
Here’s what to know:
Brad Sigmon (Credit: South Carolina Department of Corrections)
Brad Sigmon’s crime
The backstory:
Sigmon admitted to killing his ex-girlfriend's parents in 2001 with a baseball bat after she refused to come back to him.
Investigators said Sigmon was angry that they had him evicted from a trailer they owned. They were in separate rooms of their Greenville County home and Sigmon went back and forth attacking them until they were dead, according to prosecutors.
Sigmon then kidnapped his ex-girlfriend at gunpoint, but she escaped from his car. He shot at her as she ran, but missed, prosecutors said.
"My intention was to kill her and then myself," Sigmon said in a confession typed out by a detective after his arrest. "That was my intention all along. If I couldn’t have her, I wasn’t going to let anybody else have her. And I knew it got to the point where I couldn’t have her."
What we know:
His lawyers said he didn't want to pick the electric chair, which would "cook him alive," or a lethal injection, whose details are kept secret in South Carolina. He also feared an injection of pentobarbital into his veins would send a rush of fluid into his lungs and drown him. On Thursday, Sigmon asked the U.S. Supreme Court to delay his execution because the state doesn't release enough information about the lethal injection drug.
How firing squad executions work
Dig deeper:
Sigmon was pronounced dead at 6:08 p.m. ET.
On Friday, Sigmon wore a black jumpsuit with a hood over his head and a white target with a red bullseye over his chest.
The armed prison employees stood 15 feet (4.6 meters) from where he sat in the state’s death chamber — the same distance as the backboard is from the free-throw line on a basketball court. Visible in the same small room was the state’s unused electric chair. The gurney used to carry out lethal injections had been rolled away.
The volunteers all fired at the same time through openings in a wall. They were not visible to about a dozen witnesses in a room separated from the chamber by bullet-resistant glass. Sigmon made several heavy breaths during the two minutes that elapsed from when the hood was placed to the shots being fired.
His arms briefly tensed when he was shot, and the target was blasted off his chest. He appeared to give another breath or two with a red stain on his chest, and small amounts of tissue could be seen from the wound during those breaths.
A doctor came out about a minute later and examined Sigmon for 90 seconds before declaring him dead.
History of firing squad executions
Big picture view:
The execution method has a long and violent history in the U.S. and around the world. Death in a hail of bullets has been used to punish mutinies and desertion in armies, as frontier justice in America's Old West and as a tool of terror and political repression in the former Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.
Timeline:
Since 1608, at least 144 civilian prisoners have been executed by shooting in America, nearly all in Utah. Only three have occurred since 1977, when the use of capital punishment resumed after a 10-year pause. The first of those, Gary Gilmore, caused a media sensation in part because he waived his appeals and volunteered to be executed. When asked for his last words, Gilmore replied, "Let's do it."
Five states — Idaho, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Utah — authorize the use of firing squads in certain circumstances.
Ronnie Gardner was the last prisoner to be executed by firing squad, in Utah in 2010. His brother doesn't agree the method is more humane.
What they're saying:
"This will be gruesome and barbaric," Randy Gardner said. He said he didn't witness his brother's death but carries his autopsy photos in an envelope. He pulled several out to show an Associated Press reporter who will witness Friday’s execution.
"With the ammunition they are using here (in Sigmon's execution) it is going to be so much worse," Gardner said.
The other side:
In recent years, some death penalty proponents have started to see the firing squad as a more humane option: If the shooters' aim is true, death is nearly instant, whereas lethal injections require getting an IV into a vein. Electrocution appears to burn and disfigure. And inmates have been seen to writhe and struggle when the latest method, nitrogen gas, is used to suffocate them as it is pushed through a mask.
The Source: This report is based on information from the Associated Press as well as historical data from the Death Penalty Information Center and the South Carolina Department of Corrections. It was reported from Cincinnati, and the AP and Austin Williams contributed.