US state has grim choice of reaper

WASHINGTON: The US state of South Carolina has introduced a law requiring prisoners on death row to choose between firing squad and electric chair after a lack of lethal injection drugs halted executions for a decade.

“This weekend, I signed legislation into law that will allow the state to carry out a death sentence,” Governor Henry McMaster said.

“The families and loved ones of victims are owed closure and justice by law. Now, we can provide it.”

Before the pause on executions, inmates would choose between the chair and injection, with the injection being administered if no choice was made.

The new law, signed on Friday, makes the electric chair the default option if lethal injection is unavailable, and creates the alternative option of a firing squad.

Prisoner advocacy group the Incarcerated Outreach Network called the move “appalling, shocking, abhorrent”, while the South Carolina branch of the American Civil Liberties Union said it was “about finding a new way to restart executions within a racist, arbitrary and error-prone system”.

“South Carolina’s criminal justice system makes mistakes,” executive director Frank Knaack said.

“Yet, capital punishment is irreversible … Black people make up more than half of South Carolina’s death row despite being only 27 per cent of the state’s population.”

The electric chair has not been used in South Carolina since 2008 and the last execution by lethal injection was in 2011, according to the state’s Department of Corrections.

South Carolina is the fourth US state to allow death by firing squad, along with Mississippi, Oklahoma and Utah, according to the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC).