By JEFFREY COLLINS
The Associated Press
COLOMBIA (AP) – South Carolina is dusting its electric chair and trying to restart executions in the state after almost 10 years have passed without sentencing a prisoner to death.
A House Committee voted 14-7 on Tuesday to make electrocution the standard for an execution. The bill now goes to the House floor, while a similar bill is in the Senate floor.
At the moment, inmates can choose between electrocution and the current standard method of lethal injection. Since the state has no drugs to sentence a prisoner to death, South Carolina is under a de facto moratorium on the death penalty.
South Carolina last sentenced a prisoner to death nearly 10 years ago and its stockpile of lethal injectable drugs has expired. In the previous decade, the state executed 17 people.
Prisoners are nearing the end of their resources, but executions have been postponed, prison officials said. Governor Henry McMaster asked lawmakers to find a way to reinitiate the death penalty in his speech on the state of the state last month.
“We have a legal status in South Carolina that cannot be enforced,” said Republican Representative Weston Newton of Bluffton.
South Carolina lawmakers have unsuccessfully tried several ways in recent years to bring executions back. There have been bills to protect the names of companies that supply lethal injectable drugs and bills that support alternative methods, such as firing squad or electrocution, from the public.
There were about 60 people on death row on May 6, 2011, when Jeffrey Motts was the last person to be executed in the state, for killing another prisoner. Now, because of natural deaths and courts overturning death sentences and prosecutors accepting life sentences, death row has dropped to 37 prisoners.
Prosecutors have also stopped seeking death sentences. Only three new prisoners have ended up on death row in the past decade.
On Monday, Virginia lawmakers passed a bill that ends capital punishment in that state, which executed more people than anyone in the country.
Some noticed the offer for a different direction in South Carolina.
“We are here talking about how to make it easier to kill people,” said South Carolina MP Justin Bamberg, D-Bamberg.
Bamberg also mentioned George Stinney, the youngest person executed in the United States in the 20th century. He was 14 when he was sent to the electric chair in 1944 for killing two white girls. A judge rejected the black teenager’s conviction in 2014.
South Carolina began using its electric chair in 1912, after taking over the death penalty for counties, which used to hang. The state added the lethal injection in the mid-1990s, after concerns elsewhere about whether the electric chair was too barbaric.
Lethal injection became the standard for inmates who did not choose. Convicted inmates could still choose electrocution, but only two of the last 37 death row inmates opted for the electric chair.
A Republican joined the Democrats in voting against the bill. Easley Rep. Neal Collins said most of the 37 death row inmates came from just four of the state’s 46 counties. More than half are black in a state where African Americans represent about a quarter of the population. And the vast majority of blacks on death row killed a white victim.
“You just can’t beat these statistics,” said Collins, who is a private lawyer who helped with the death penalty case.
Proponents of the project did not speak much at Tuesday’s hearing. Congressman Micah Caskey read a few paragraphs detailing the crimes that put one of the last prisoners on death row – a father who killed his five children, all under the age of 9.
“The death penalty exists for the guilty,” said Caskey, a Republican from West Columbia. “The death penalty exists because there are some crimes for which the only justice that can be done is death.”