South Carolina is taking a step closer to bringing the electric chair back, as it seeks to resume executions in the state after a decade.
According to state law, executions in South Carolina must be carried out by lethal injection, unless a prisoner opts for electrocution.
However, South Carolina’s lethal injecting drug supply expired in 2013, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Prison officials say they haven’t been able to acquire any since. The state’s last execution was the death of Jeffrey Motts in May 2011. In the previous ten years, South Carolina had sentenced 17 prisoners to death.
Governor Henry McMaster, a Republican, asked state lawmakers to find a way to restart executions.
“The Department of Corrections has not been able to carry out the death penalty for lethal injection since 2015 because the companies that manufacture the drugs will not sell them unless their identities are protected by state law from anti-death penalty activists,” said McMaster in his state’s state address last month.
“We have no way of serving a death sentence in South Carolina – and the killers know that.”
Getty
He added: “I ask the General Assembly: fix this. Give these families and loved ones in mourning the justice and closure that is due to them by law.”
In an attempt to do this, the South Carolina House of Representatives Judiciary Committee voted 14 to 7 on Tuesday to advance a bill that would make electrocution the standard method of execution, he reported. The state newspaper.
This project will now go to the plenary of the Chamber for a debate. A similar bill is on the South Carolina Senate calendar, but has not yet been discussed, according to the Columbia newspaper.
Supporters of the bill argued that it would ensure that the state could serve death sentences, reported The state.
“This bill is not about the merits of whether or not we should have the death penalty,” said Rep. Weston Newton of South Carolina, a Republican. “It’s about whether we can comply with the law [sentence]. “
Another Republican state deputy, Micah Caskey, said the death sentence “exists for the guilty.”
But Rep. Justin Bamberg, a Democrat, pointed to George Stinney’s case to demonstrate that innocent people have been sentenced to death in the state.
Stinney, a 14-year-old black boy, was executed in 1944 after being convicted of the murder of two white girls. He was exonerated 70 years later.
Another opponent of the bill, Republican Neal Collins, highlighted racial inequality on death row in South Carolina – pointing out that just over half of the 37 inmates are black, when blacks represent only about a quarter of the state’s population .
South Carolina’s pressure to bring back the electric chair contrasts sharply with that of Virginia, where lawmakers on Monday passed a bill abolishing the death penalty.
A report from the Death Penalty Information Center last December said that death sentences dropped to historic levels in 2020, even as the federal government increased executions in the final months of Donald Trump’s presidency.