South Carolina state senators voted Tuesday to pass a bill designed to restart executions in the state, adding shooting or electrocution as options if lethal injectable drugs are not available. The news comes after a break of almost 10 years in executions in the state.
Although the death penalty is legal in South Carolina, which has 37 people on death row, the state has failed to buy the drugs needed to carry out lethal injection executions. This project would force people sentenced to death to choose between the electric chair and a firing squad if lethal injectable drugs were not available.
The senators approved the bill with a vote of 32 to 11 on Tuesday. The bill will undergo a routine vote before it passes the Senate and will be referred to the House of Representatives with a Republican majority. In a statement to CBS News, a spokesman for Governor Henry McMaster said he would “proudly” enact this legislation.
The bill, submitted by Republican lawmakers, was drafted first to require the electric chair to be the only option if lethal injection was not available, but a Democrat, Senator Dick Harpootlian, helped introduce an amendment that would also allow prisoners to choose death by firing squad. that some see as more human than the electric chair.
Kinard Lisbon / South Carolina Department of Correction / AP
In a dissenting opinion from the 2017 Supreme Court, Judge Sonia Sotomayor said that while some may think that firing squad death is regressive, the evidence suggests that it can cause almost instant death and resulted in fewer failed executions than lethal injection. . She wrote: “In addition to being almost instantaneous, gunshot death can also be comparatively painless.”
Senator Karl Allen, a Democrat who opposed the bill, warned against resuming executions, citing racial disparities among those sentenced to death. Of the 282 people executed in South Carolina since 1912, 208 were black, according to the South Carolina Department of Corrections.
“Unfortunately, we ignore statistics that indicate that our implementation of the death penalty and electrocution is having a different impact between the poor and African Americans,” he said. Allen pointed to the execution in 1944 of a 14-year-old George Stinney, whose conviction was overturned 70 years after his death.
Allen also called the firing squads “inhuman” and said: “they do not meet 2021 social norms”.
In November, South Carolina postponed the execution of the death row inmate, Richard Moore, after the state was unable to obtain the drugs to perform the lethal injection. Moore had the option, but declined the alternative method of execution: electrocution. Moore was found guilty of the 1999 murder of a convenience store clerk during a robbery. In an email, Moore’s lawyer declined to comment on the bill.
Senator Shane Martin, Republican chairman of the Senate Corrections and Penology Committee, said the bill is not about whether the state has the death penalty, but how to make the death penalty law functional. “There is no need to have a law if we cannot enforce it,” he said.
South Carolina, like many other states that still apply the death penalty, has struggled to buy lethal injectable drugs because pharmaceutical companies refuse to sell drugs that they know will be used for executions, according to Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, a group that does not take a stand on the death penalty, but criticizes its application.
As execution drugs remain difficult to buy, states across the country have sought alternative methods of execution, Dunham said. Oklahoma began efforts to use lethal gas, and in Tennessee, some inmates chose to be killed by electrocution after a wave of lethal injection executions went wrong.
Allen said he was concerned that the bill did not define what made lethal injectable drugs “unavailable” and feared that prisoners could be sent to the electric chair if the drugs were simply considered too expensive. “They are putting a price on life, dignity and humanity,” he said.
Dunham said that while public opinion about the execution varies from state to state, Americans consider methods such as firing squad or electric chair so much more cruel than lethal injection.
Senator Katrina Shealy, one of the Republicans who helped introduce the bill, acknowledged that many methods of execution pose risks. “There have been, you know, unsuccessful executions (lethal injection) in which the person took longer to die. But it’s the same with the electric chair. You know, you can take two bumps instead of one. So, there is always one possibility. This is not something you want to happen. ”
Shealy cited the case of a man who was sentenced to death after being convicted of the murder of his five children. “As it stands now, we have no way of putting them to death,” she said. “I don’t think it should be used lightly. I think it should be used, you know, when necessary.”
Senator Greg Hembree, another co-author of the bill, is a former prosecutor who said he had witnessed two executions by lethal injection. “They are horrible,” he said, “there is nothing to be happy about when that kind of sentence is carried out, but you want to – the government must be as human as possible in doing so, if we are going to stick to it.”
The last time South Carolina executed a prisoner was in 2011, using lethal injection. The last time the state executed someone for electrocution was in 2008.