It’s unknown how long a stay will hold off the execution of Richard Bernard Moore — South Carolina’s first-ever inmate to be put to death by a firing squad — as his attorneys pursue legal challenges. But the issuance of Moore’s death warrant, initially planned to be carried out April 29, has renewed interest in how a state puts in motion its plans to shoot an inmate to death. The method is employed in only a handful of states and has not been used in the U.S. in more than a decade. South Carolina just instituted the firing squad option last year, giving condemned inmates the choice between that and electrocution, prompted by an inability to procure lethal injection drugs. In choosing the firing squad, the 57-year-old Moore said he didn’t concede that either method was legal or constitutional but that he more strongly opposed death by electrocution and only opted for the firing squad because he was required to make a choice. Moore drew the death sentence for the 1999 killing of convenience store clerk James Mahoney in Spartanburg. Planning to rob the store for money to support his cocaine habit, investigators have said that Mahoney pulled a gun, which Moore was able to wrestle away and use to shoot the clerk. A May 13 execution date has also been set for another inmate, Brad Sigmon, although a state judge is examining his legal argument that both electrocution and the firing squad are “barbaric” methods of killing. Only three executions in the United States have been carried out by firing squad since 1976, according to the Washington-based nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center. Moore’s would mark the first since Ronnie Lee Gardner ’s 2010 execution by a five-person firing squad in Utah. WHEN DID THIS PROCESS BEGIN? South Carolina — once home to one of the busiest death chambers in the nation — has been unable to carry out any execution since 2011, an involuntary pause that officials have attributed to the state’s inability to procure the trifecta of drugs needed to carry out a lethal injection. Condemned inmates had the choice between injection and electrocution, meaning that opting for the former would in essence leave the state unable to carry out the sentence. For several years, lawmakers have mulled adding the firing squad as an option to approved methods, but debate never advanced. Last year, Democratic Sen. Dick Harpootlian and GOP Sen. Greg Hembree, both of whom previously served as prosecutors, again argued in favor of adding the firing squad option. “The death penalty is going to stay the law here for a while. If it is going to remain, it ought to be humane,” Harpootlian said, positing that the firing squad provided a more humane alternative than electrocution, if executions were to continue in the GOP-dominated state. The measure, which Republican Gov. Henry McMaster signed into law last May, made South Carolina the fourth state in the country to allow use of a firing squad, according to the Washington-based nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center. HOW IS THE EXECUTION CARRIED OUT? Since the bill’s passage, the South Carolina Department of Corrections worked at retrofitting its existing death chamber in Columbia — where executions by lethal injection and electrocution have been carried out for more than 30 years — to […]

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