After a 13-year hiatus, South Carolina is looking to resume three execution methods: lethal injection, firing squad, and the electric chair. The decision is pending Tuesday’s oral arguments for four death row inmates’ lawsuits, which claim the methods are cruel and unusual punishments.
The inmates’ lawyers also plan to argue Tuesday that the state’s 2023 law permitting lethal injection to resume isn’t transparent enough. The shield law was passed to protect the identities of companies selling drugs used for lethal injection or any prison employees involved in the execution procedure.
South Carolina hasn’t executed someone via lethal injection in 13 years because the drugs they used expired and companies refused to sell them more unless their names could be protected, the Associated Press reported. South Carolina says the three forms of execution are acceptable to the state’s protocols.
“Courts have never held the death has to be instantaneous or painless,” Grayson Lambert, a lawyer representing Gov. Henry McMaster’s (R-SC) office, wrote.
Lawyers for Justice 360, an organization that helps fight for inmates on death row and seeks transparency in the death penalty process, are pushing back on the state law. Attorneys for the inmates are arguing that the shield law is unconstitutional.
“No inmate in the country has ever been put to death with such little transparency about how he or she would be executed,” wrote Lindsey Vann, a lawyer for Justice 360.
Prior to 2011, South Carolina, which had 60 inmates on death row at the time, used to conduct about three executions a year, the outlet reported. Inmates’ appeals and deaths have left just 33 inmates on the state’s death row since then, per the Associated Press.
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In facing the challenges of accessing drugs for lethal injection, prosecutors have reportedly been sending fewer prisoners to death row, opting for guilty pleas and life in prison instead.
Unless inmates choose otherwise, the default method of execution in South Carolina is the electric chair. While the state authorized the use of firing squads in 2021, it has not adopted the newest form of execution, nitrogen hypoxia, which was used for the first time last month on an Alabama death row inmate.
