A death row inmate is set to be the first person to die by firing squad in the US since 2010.
Brad Sigmon will be executed at Broad River prison in Columbia, South Carolina at 6pm local time today unless he is given a last-minute reprieve.
Sigmon, 67, was sentenced to death for killing his ex-girlfriend Rebecca Armstrong’s parents, David Larke, 62 and Gladys Larke, 59, with a baseball bat in 2001.
He also kidnapped Ms Armstrong and planned to kill her, but she escaped.
Sigmon later admitted to killing the Larkes after their daughter refused to come back to him and the pair had him evicted from a trailer they owned.
The couple had been in separate rooms at their Greenville County home and Sigmon went back and forth attacking them until they were dead, investigators said.
Sigmon then kidnapped Ms Armstrong (whose surname was Barbare at the time) at gunpoint, but she escaped from his car. He shot at her as she ran, but missed, prosecutors said.
‘My intention was to kill her and then myself,’ Sigmon said in a confession typed out by a detective after his arrest.
‘That was my intention all along. If I couldn’t have her, I wasn’t going to let anybody else have her. And I knew it got to the point where I couldn’t have her.’
Twenty years after their deaths, Ms Armstrong, now 59, told USA Today, she had forgiven Sigmon through her faith in God, but added that she would feel some relief at his death.
The now 59-year-old plans to watch the execution.
Speaking of her parents, who had five children and worked in a metals factory, she said: ‘I miss my momma and daddy.
‘I didn’t get to see them grow old. I didn’t get to take care of them. My brothers and sisters, we missed that.’
Several anti death penalty protesters gathered outside the prison yesterday calling for Sigmon’s sentence to be revoked.
If his sentence is not revoked in several hours time, this evening he’ll be taken to a death chamber.
A target will be placed over his heart, a hood will be pulled over his head, and then three volunteers armed with rifles will simultaneously fire bullets at him.
Only four other people have been killed by firing squad since the death penalty was reinstated in the US 49 years ago.
Sigmon said he chose this method because he felt the other choices offered by the state would be worse.
Sigmon’s lawyer Gerald ‘Bo’ King said Sigmon didn’t want to pick the electric chair, which would ‘cook him alive,’ and feared a lethal injection would be ‘just as monstrous’.
‘If he chose lethal injection, he risked the prolonged death suffered by all three of the men South Carolina has executed since September — three men Brad knew and cared for — who remained alive, strapped to a gurney, for more than twenty minutes,’ Mr King wrote in a statement.
The lawyer said South Carolina does not release enough information about the lethal drug, which was also behind Sigmon’s reason to avoid it.
‘He does not wish to inflict that pain on his family, the witnesses, or the execution team. But, given South Carolina’s unnecessary and unconscionable secrecy, Brad is choosing as best he can,’ Mr King added.
Death by firing squad has been used to punish mutinies and desertion in armies, as frontier justice in America’s Old West and as a tool of terror and political repression in the former Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.
In recent years, however, some death penalty supporters have started to see the method as a more humane option.
Why does South Carolina have a firing squad?
South Carolina introduced a firing squad option as it struggled to find alternative methods to execute death row inmates.
By the beginning of this decade, the state’s supply of lethal injection drugs was gone and no company would sell more except anonymously, which was not allowed at the time.
Judges would not set execution dates if the electric chair was the only method.
Thirteen years elapsed between executions, and cases of death row inmates started to pile up.
A Democratic lawmaker in South Carolina suggested a firing squad if the state was going to keep capital punishment.
Supporters cited U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who wrote in a 2017 dissent that ‘in addition to being near instant, death by shooting may also be comparatively painless’.
Sigmon has been close to death before. He had execution dates set three times, but each time it was when the state didn’t have lethal injection drugs and judges halted his death warrant because he couldn’t choose that method.
Can Sigmon’s still be spared?
For Sigmon’s life to be spared, either the US Supreme Court or South Carolina Republican governor Henry McMaster must intervene.
His lawyers have asked Mr McMaster to commute his death sentence to life in prison.
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They said Sigmon is ‘a model prisoner trusted by guards and works every day to atone for the killings he committed after succumbing to severe mental illness.’
No South Carolina governor has granted clemency to a prisoner set to beexecuted since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976. Since then, 46 men have been put to death in the state.
The state Supreme Court has been issuing death warrants every five weeks.
Two more inmates are currently out of appeals. They will also get to choose between lethal injection, firing squad or the electric chair.
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