A South Carolina man on death row has opted to die by firing squad. Brad Sigmon, who was sentenced to death for beating his ex-girlfriend’s parents to death with a baseball bat, is the first person in South Carolina to select this method of execution since it was added as an option in 2024.
He is scheduled to be executed on March 7.
At 65, Sigmon would be the oldest person ever put to death in South Carolina and the first person executed by a firing squad.
Death row inmates in South Carolina are given the choice of their method of execution between lethal injection, electric chair and the firing squad. Since executions in the state resumed in September 2024, all three men executed have selected lethal injection.
The South Carolina General Assembly added the firing squad as an option in 2021. Its addition came after the state had to pause executions for nearly a decade when it ran out of the drugs needed to perform the lethal injection.
Following legal challenges, the General Assembly also reinstated the use of the electric chair as well altered the lethal injection protocol to a single dose of pentobarbital instead of the previous three-drug cocktail. If an inmate makes no choice, the default is the electric chair.
Sigmon’s choice of the firing squad comes as concerns have grown about the use of pentobarbital, a powerful sedative that causes asphyxiation at high doses. The federal government, which also uses pentobarbital, is currently reviewing the drug over concerns that it causes an unnecessarily painful death.
Legal filings have raised the concern that the drug, which is as caustic as household cleaners and ammonia, causes a pulmonary edema, where the lungs fill with fluid, causing the person to feel as if they are drowning.
“The choice Brad faced today was impossible. Unless he elected lethal injection or the firing squad, he would die in South Carolina’s ancient electric chair, which would burn and cook him alive. But the alternative is just as monstrous,” said Gerald “Bo” King, a Federal Public Defender and one of Sigmon’s attorneys.