South Carolina, which has not run the death penalty for 10 years, has enacted a law that forces death row inmates to choose between the electric chair and the firing squad.
South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster signed the new law last week, ending the state’s 10-year “involuntary” moratorium on executions because of the lack of lethal injection materials to run the death penalty.
McMaster tweeted on the 17th that the law owes justice to the families of the victims’ loved ones who were executed for a limited time, and “now we can give them justice.”
The final version of the bill passed by state lawmakers still retains lethal injection as the “primary method” provision, but also provides that prison officials, in the absence of lethal injection, can run the death penalty by electric chair or gunshot.
The prosecution said the three death row inmates had gone through all the appeal routes, but still could not be executed because the original law stipulated that death row inmates who did not want to sit in the electric chair must be executed by lethal injection. They all chose not to sit in the electric chair, and the prison authorities do not have injections, the problem is hanging there.
Just because the new law was signed into law does not mean that the three inmates are scheduled to die. The electric chair is ready, but the composition of the execution team, still referring to the practice of other states, South Carolina when to form their own firing squad, no one can say. It refers to Mississippi, Oklahoma and Utah, the three states that still permit the execution of criminals by firing squad.
Utah has executed three death row inmates since the federal government reinstated firing squad laws in 1977. The nation has electrocuted 19 death row inmates so far this century. South Carolina is one of eight states that still allow the death penalty to be run in the electric chair.
Lawyers for the three “death row” inmates are considering filing another lawsuit, arguing that the new law is retroactive.
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