The new law, which came into effect last month, was designed to close a loophole that allowed inmates to indefinitely postpone their executions if the drugs were not available. Given the lack of a firing squad, electrocution was the only method of execution available in the state.
But lawyers for Sigmon and Owens challenged the use of the method in court, arguing their clients have the right to die by lethal injection. They petitioned the South Carolina Supreme Court to stop the planned executions of their clients until their appeals had been heard.
On Wednesday, the court ruled in their favour, saying the inmates had not been given the choice "to elect the manner of their execution".
The court said no further execution notices should be issued until "protocols and policies to carry out executions by firing squad" are in place.
In response to the court order, the state's prison authorities said it was "moving ahead with creating policies and procedures for a firing squad". We will notify the court when a firing squad becomes an option for executions," the South Carolina Department of Corrections said. South Carolina is one of four states that allow executions by firing squad. Oklahoma, Mississippi and Utah are the others. Sigmon, 63, was scheduled to be executed on Friday. He has spent nearly two decades on death row after he was convicted in of killing his ex-girlfriend's parents with a baseball bat.
While this procedure has since faded in modern times, it is still considered to be a legal procedure for dealing with criminal soldiers and political figures in many countries. Firing squads are not reserved solely for people serving in the military.
Some armies have used this method to slaughter citizens of countries they were invading. The victims of these death squads are most often buried in mass graves following the shootings. This heinous act is considered to be a crime against humanity and may be punishable by the International Criminal Court. For more information, please visit: Execution Methods. At oral argument, Alito laid the blame for tortured inmates at the feet of pharmaceutical companies that refused to be complicit in executions.
The effective holding of Glossip , in other words, was that if death penalty opponents made it too difficult to execute people without causing them great pain, then states were free to torture people to death. Then the Court went even further in Bucklew v. Precythe in States like South Carolina, in other words, can be fairly confident that the Supreme Court will bless their decision to revive methods of execution that have largely fallen out of favor with modern society.
In , a death row inmate named Thomas Arthur brought a very unusual claim to the Supreme Court. Arthur was scheduled to be executed by the state of Alabama, and Alabama planned to kill him using a three-drug protocol that included a notoriously unreliable anesthetic.
He asked the Court to allow him to be killed by firing squad instead because he thought such a death would be less painful than the fate Alabama intended for him. Though the Court rejected this request in Arthur v. Dunn , Sotomayor once again dissented. Just as significantly, Sotomayor indicted the entire process of using toxic drugs to kill people, because it sanitized the process of executions without rendering them any less cruel.
A lethal injection can appear like a sterile medical procedure, where the person being executed seems to slip into a peaceful sleep.
Inmates executed by firing squad appear to be less likely to experience the prolonged agony faced by many people who are executed by lethal drugs. And if South Carolina insists on killing people, it will be harder to ignore the enormity of what the state is doing.
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