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South Carolina has given the green light to the height of firebreaks, a method that was coded into state law last year after a decade-long hiatus in the execution of death sentences due to the state’s inability to buy fatal injectable drugs .
The state Department of Corrections said Friday that the renovations of the death chamber in Colombia have been completed and that the agency has informed Attorney General Alan Wilson that it would be able to carry out a firefighting operation.
Legislators have adapted state law to deal with the deadly injection drug situation. Legislation that came into force in May made the electric chair the state’s primary means of execution, while giving prisoners the option of electing death by firearms or lethal injection, if those methods are available.
In this April 16, 2018, photo, a guard tower stands over the Lee Correctional Institution, a maximum security prison in Bishopville, SC South Carolina has given the green light for the execution of the firefighters.
(AP Photo / Sean Rayford)
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During South Carolina’s long debate, Democrat Sen. Dick Harpootlian – a prosecutor-turned-criminal defense attorney – introduced the option to the shooting team, arguing that it was “the least painful” execution method available.
“The death penalty will keep the law here for a while,” Harpootlian said. “If we were to have it, it should be human.”
According to officials, the death chamber now also contains a metal chair, with restrictions, in the corner of the room, in which the inmates sit when they choose the execution by the shooting team. This chair stands in front of a wall with a rectangular opening, 15 feet away, through which the three shooters shoot their weapons.
South Carolina Sen. Dick Harpootlian, D-Columbia, speaks in favor of a bill that would add gunshot wounds to the electric chair and lethal injection as execution methods in the state on March 2, 2021 in Columbia, SC.
(AP Photo / Jeffrey Collins)
State officials have also drawn up protocols to carry out the executions. Three shooters, all volunteers who are employees of the Correctional Department, will have rifles loaded with live ammunition, trained with their weapons at the heart of the prisoner.
A hood is placed over the head of the prisoner, who is given the opportunity to make one last statement.
According to officials, the corrections cost $ 53,600 for the renovation work.
South Carolina is one of eight states to still use the electric chair and one of four to allow a firefighter, according to Washington-based nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center.
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In June, the South Carolina Supreme Court blocked the planned executions of two prisoners by electrocution, saying they could not be killed until they had a choice of a firearms option set forth in the state’s newly revised state law.
The electric chair used on the death penalty from Florida
(Florida Department of Corrections)
The Supreme Court has stopped the planned executions of Brad Sigmon and Freddie Owens, and ordered officers to put together a fire brigade so that the intruders could choose between that or the electric chair. The plans of the state, the court writes in a unanimous order, were rejected “because of the legal right of the prisoners to choose the manner of their execution.”
Now that a fire brigade has been formed, the court must issue a new order to carry out each execution.
The executions were planned less than a month after the passage of the new law. Prison officials have previously said they can still not get fatal injections and have yet to put together a fire brigade, leaving the 109-year-old electric chair as the only option.
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Advocates for the two men have argued in legal cases that death by electrocution is cruel and unusual, saying the new law moves the state into less humane methods of execution. They also said that men had the right to die by lethal injection – the method the two had chosen – and that the state had not worked out all the methods to get lethal injections.
State attorneys have argued that prison officials simply enforce the law and that the U.S. Supreme Court has never found electrocution to be unconstitutional.
South Carolina’s last outpouring took place in 2011, and its batch of fatal injectable drugs expired two years later. There are 37 men on death row from the state.
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