After a roughly decadelong hiatus and a new capacity to execute via firing squad, South Carolina is set to resume death penalty executions.
Richard Moore, 57, who was convicted in 2001 for murdering a convenience store clerk, is scheduled to be executed on April 29 — marking the first execution in the state since 2011, the South Carolina Department of Corrections announced Thursday.
SOUTH CAROLINA TO RESUME FIRING SQUAD EXECUTIONS
“By law, Moore will be asked to choose his method of execution 14 days before execution day. Methods available are the electric chair and firing squad,” the department said.
Last month, the department announced it had completed necessary renovations to its corrections facility to carry out death row orders via firing squad to comply with an order from the Supreme Court of South Carolina. The high court had put a stay on pending executions and called on the department to develop new protocols and upgrade its facility after Gov. Henry McMaster signed a bill last May that sought to modernize the death penalty process in the state.
Executions in the Palmetto State stalled for about a decade because officials struggled to procure lethal injection drugs. The bill was intended to rejuvenate the process. It made the electric chair the primary death row technique and imparted condemned prisoners two additional options to choose from for a method of execution: firing squad and lethal injection.
Democratic state Sen. Dick Harpootlian added the firing squad option to the bill, insisting it was the “least painful” option.
“The death penalty is going to stay the law here for a while,” Harpootlian said, per the Associated Press. “If we’re going to have it, it ought to be humane.”
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Currently, the Palmetto State has an estimated 37 prisoners on death row. The state Supreme Court upheld Moore’s death sentence in a Wednesday ruling.
There are three other states — Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Utah — that permit the use of firing squads for executions. Only three people have been killed by firing squad since 1976, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
