South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster signed into law a bill requiring death row inmates to choose between death by the electric chair or by firing squad, following an involuntary, 10-year pause to executions.
The state was formerly one of the most prolific states putting inmates to death, but a shortage of lethal injection drugs drastically reduced executions, according to the South Carolina Department of Corrections.
The Republican governor signed the bill on Friday with little public attention brought to the measure, the state Legislature’s webpage showed.
State lawmakers gave their final approval of the bill last week, passing with GOP support in a 66-43 vote in the House. The new law maintains lethal injection as the primary method of execution if the state possesses the drugs. If lethal injection is not an immediate option, the law now requires officials to use the electric chair or firing squad.
It is not immediately clear when the two execution methods can begin. The state’s 109-year-old electric chair is ready for use, and prison officials are conducting research into how firing squads perform executions in other states, according to local station WSOC-TV.
Three other states that allow a firing squad are Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Utah, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. South Carolina is one of eight states that can still electrocute inmates.
The Palmetto State has 37 prisoners currently on death row, three of whom are out of appeals.
Democrats opposed the legislation, offering amendments, before the bill passed the House on May 6, in an attempt to block the use of firing squads. One amendment suggested exempting current inmates on death row from the new capital punishment ultimatum.
“Three living, breathing human beings with a heartbeat that this bill is aimed at killing,” Democratic State Rep. Justin Bamberg said. “If you push the green button at the end of the day and vote to pass this bill out of this body, you may as well be throwing the switch yourself.”
Seven Republicans voted against the bill, WSOC-TV reported.
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South Carolina’s last execution took place in May 2010, and its batch of lethal injection drugs expired in 2013. Nineteen inmates have died by electric chair in the United States this century, and three inmates have been killed by firing squad since the U.S. reinstated the death penalty in 1977.
