South Carolina Supreme Court rejects man's final appeal, clearing way for firing squad execution

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — The South Carolina Supreme Court has rejected what is likely the final appeal of condemned man Brad Sigmon, clearing the way for Friday's firing squad execution.

Sigmon's lawyers wanted to delay his death so they could get a fuller hearing in court to learn more information about the drug South Carolina uses in lethal injections. Sigmon said that lack of information forced him to choose to be shot to death. The state also has an electric chair, but Sigmon said he didn't want to suffer being cooked alive by electricity.

Sigmon's attorneys also argued that his lawyers in the original 2002 trial did a poor job of trying to save his life after he pleaded guilty by not submitting enough evidence of his mental problems.

Sigmon, 67, beat his ex-girlfriend's parents to death with a baseball bat in their Greenville County home. His plan was to kidnap his ex-girlfriend, spend a romantic weekend together and then kill her and himself. She escaped from his car as he drove away.

"If I couldn’t have her, I wasn’t going to let anybody else have her. And I knew it got to the point where I couldn’t have her,” Sigmon said in a confession typed out by a detective after his arrest.

Sigmon will be strapped into a chair at 6 p.m. Friday in the death chamber used for all South Carolina executions at Broad River Correctional Institution in Columbia. A target will be placed over his heart and a hood over his head. Three shooters, all with live ammunition, will fire from 15 feet (4.6 meters) away.

Sigmon would be the first inmate killed by firing squad in the U.S. in 15 years.

Lawyers for Sigmon said in court papers that he chose a violent death by firing squad because, without more information, he thought he would die a tortuous death if he picked lethal injection.

Autopsies from two inmates executed in the months since South Carolina changed its method of lethal injection to massive amounts of pentobarbital showed a considerable amount of fluid in their lungs. A defense expert testified the inmates could have suffered struggling to breathe.

But lawyers for the state have said fluid is often found in the lungs of prisoners killed by lethal injections and other courts have not ruled it was cruel and unusual punishment. They also said witnesses at the executions, including the inmates' attorneys, did not report any breathing or signs of consciousness after about a minute.

Prison officials also told the doctor conducting the autopsy that both Marion Bowman, who was executed on Jan. 31, and Richard Moore, executed on Nov. 1, needed twice the dose of the lethal injection drug typically used in other states and by the federal government.

In Moore's case, two doses were given 11 minutes apart. In Bowman's execution, it wasn't clear the time range, although a witness heard talking 10 minutes after the execution began.

“There is no justice here. Everything about this barbaric, state-sanctioned atrocity — from the choice to the method itself — is abjectly cruel. We should not just be horrified — we should be furious,” defense attorney Gerald “Bo” King said in a statement,

South Carolina has a shield law that keeps the suppliers of its lethal injection drugs, the members of the execution team and the procedure used to kill an inmate secret, so it isn't known if South Carolina's new protocol requires two doses of pentobarbital.

Sigmon also plans to ask Republican Gov. Henry McMaster to commute his death sentence to life in prison. His lawyers said he is a model prisoner trusted by guards and works every day to atone for the killings he committed after succumbing to severe mental illness.

McMaster will make his decision moments before the execution starts. No South Carolina governor has granted clemency in the 49 years since the death penalty restarted.