South Carolina death row inmates seek sentencing delay amid firing squad appeal

Attorneys for two men on South Carolina’s death row on Monday requested the state’s Supreme Court to hold off on scheduling their executions while they challenge a new law that allows executions to be carried out by firing squad. 

The men, 64-year-old Brad Keith Sigmon and 44-year-old Freddie Eugene Owens, were previously scheduled to be executed, but their lawyers sent in a request on Monday after the state announced that it was ready to carry out executions by firing squad. Their execution was scheduled less than a month after the new law’s passage, according to the Associated Press. 

Their attorneys argue that their clients should not be executed while the lower court considers whether the method is constitutional. They maintain that the men have the right to die by lethal injection, rather than by firing squad or by electrocution, which are the two choices offered under the new law.

“Firing squad mutilates the body by exploding the chest with high-powered rifles, leaving holes in the corpse, exposing internal tissue, destroying internal organs, and soaking the prisoner’s clothing, the sand bags that surround it, and the ground with blood,” attorney Emily Paavola wrote in the Monday filing, according to the AP.

A hearing for their request is scheduled for April 4. 

When the men’s executions were initially scheduled, prison officials said they still could not obtain lethal injection drugs and had yet to put together a firing squad, including three Corrections Department employees to volunteer as shooters, the AP noted. That left the 109-year-old electric chair as the last option. However, the men’s lawyers argued that the state has not exhausted all methods to obtain lethal injection drugs.

Sigmon was convicted in 2002 of killing his ex-girlfriend’s parents with a baseball bat and has been on death row since then. Owens was convicted in 1999 killing of a convenience store clerk and has been on and off death row.