For some on death row, the firing squad is an option

South Carolina has now joined three other states -- Mississippi, Oklahoma and Utah -- that permit firing-squad executions of prisoners on death row. And here’s a nice touch: In South Carolina, it’s up to the condemned to choose which execution method they prefer.

The law was codified this past year after South Carolina went 10 years without executing anyone, chiefly because the state couldn’t get lethal-injection drugs. Although injection has been the most common means of execution in the United States for years (but not in South Carolina, where the electric chair has ruled), pharmaceutical companies are increasingly reluctant to provide the drugs, forcing states to come up with other options. All of this means that the welcome if involuntary pause in state-sponsored executions is about to end.

To prepare for the new option, the state spent more than $53,000 to equip the firing-squad chamber. It features a metal chair with restraints facing a rectangular opening in the opposite wall where three shooters would fire their weapons. The inmate’s head would be covered with a hood. The three shooters, volunteers from the state’s Department of Corrections, each would have a rifle loaded with live ammunition. All three would aim at the inmate’s heart.

There is no good way to die by another’s hand. Lethal drugs sometimes fail, prolonging the experience of dying. Electrocution, inescapably brutal, sometimes fails and must be repeated in what can only be viewed as horrifically inhumane.

South Carolina’s firing-squad legislation was introduced by Democratic state Sen. Dick Harpootlian. A popular politician and former prosecutor, Harpootlian argued that being shot is the “least painful” way to be killed. I’ll take his word for it.

Other people think a firing squad is easier on the executioners and I suppose this argument has some psychological merit. That is, if you support the death penalty. I do not, for a multitude of reasons but primarily because I don’t think the state should kill its citizens for any reason. Life without parole appears to be a more punitive outcome, especially given that the death penalty obviously isn’t an effective deterrent. And the cost of detaining a prisoner for life is still usually less than the exorbitant expense of lengthy death row appeals. As things stand, the average length of stay on death row in the United States is 22 years, according to the Pew Research Center. And, of course, there’s a 1 in 25 chance, conservatively, that the death row inmate is innocent, according to a 2014 National Academy of Sciences report. In my book, one innocent person killed by the state is one too many.

My perspective is admittedly academic. I haven’t experienced the murder of a close friend or a family member and might feel differently under such circumstances. Revenge is a powerful force. But if we can dispassionately and, effectively, murder a person in restraints, we can surely harness the same dispassion for the longer, harsher punishment of life behind bars. Some 24 states still have the death penalty, while 23 others and the District of Columbia have abolished it. Three states have imposed a moratorium.

Currently, 35 prisoners sit on death row in South Carolina, two of whom -- Brad Sigmon and Freddie Owens -- were previously scheduled for execution a month after the law passed. Both were granted reprieves by the South Carolina Supreme Court because neither had been given a choice of method as required under the new law. That was because the state couldn’t procure the necessary drugs and the firing-squad infrastructure wasn’t yet in place.

No choice, the justices ruled unanimously, no execution.

Sigmon and Owens have since chosen lethal injection, which still isn’t available. The 64-yearold Sigmon, who said he feared he would be fried “like a piece of bacon” in the electric chair, was convicted of the murder of his ex-girlfriend’s parents with a baseball bat. Owens, 44, was sentenced to death for the Halloween murder of a convenience store clerk, who was shot in the head during a robbery because she couldn’t get the safe to open.

Sigmon has been on death row for 20 years; Owens for 23. The state is still trying to procure lethal drugs for their executions.