Is South Carolina Willing to Heed the Clearest Lesson We Have About Executions? (2024)

Carrying out an execution is always a complicated business that takes a horrible toll on anyone who is associated with it. When that business is rushed, that toll gets worse, and the possibility of error grows.

Those are the lessons of America’s death-penalty history. They are the lessons that the state of South Carolina should heed as it contemplates getting back into the execution business.

On Monday, the South Carolina Supreme Court gave the go-ahead for the state’s next execution and also agreed to consider a request from four of the state’s death-row inmates that South Carolina wait at least three months between executions. In the meantime, no other death warrants will be issued.

Several of the state’s death-row inmates have already exhausted their appeals and are now facing the prospect of execution. They include Richard Moore, who was convicted of killing a convenience store clerk in 1999; Brad Sigmon, who was convicted of beating to death his estranged girlfriend’s parents in 2001; Marion Bowman, who has been on death row since 2001; and Mikal Mahdi, who was sentenced to death for shooting an off-duty police officer in 2004.

South Carolina’s latest round of executions is scheduled for Sept. 20. On that date, Freddie Eugene Owens will be put to death for the 1997 killing of a convenience store clerk.

In setting that date, as the Death Penalty Information Center reports, the court gave the director of the South Carolina Department of Corrections “five days to determine that all three [of the state’s] methods of execution [electrocution, firing squad, and lethal injection] are available.”

Owens will then have just a week to choose a method of execution. If he does not decide, he will be executed by the electric chair.

Under existing law, the state can perform another execution as soon as one week after it puts Owens to death.

But it has been much longer than that since South Carolina carried out a death sentence. It last did so in May 2011, when it executed Jeffrey Motts using a previously untried lethal injection drug co*cktail.

Since then, like many other states, South Carolina has had difficulty obtaining the drugs required for executions. To address this problem, the state added the firing squad and electrocution to its execution menu.

The long hiatus between executions marks a stark departure for the Palmetto State. South Carolina, the Associated Press says,

was once one of the busiest states for executions, but for years had had trouble obtaining lethal injection drugs due to pharmaceutical companies’ concerns that they would have to disclose that they had sold the drugs to officials. …

South Carolina has put 43 inmates to death since the death penalty was restarted in the U.S. in 1976. In the early 2000s, it was carrying out an average of three executions a year. Only nine states have put more inmates to death.

And, according to ABC News, “South Carolina has held executions in rapid succession before. Two half-brothers were put to death in one night in December 1998. Another execution followed on each of the next two Fridays that month, with two more in January 1999.”

Now South Carolina wants to do it again. In July the state Supreme Court cleared the way for it to rev up its execution apparatus after it found that each of the execution methods allowed under state law passed constitutional muster. The court will now take up the question of how briskly the state can move from one execution to the next.

The death-row inmates seeking to ensure that the state does so in a careful and deliberate manner told the South Carolina Supreme Court that proceeding quickly from one execution to another increases the risk that executions will be botched.

South Carolina can also learn from what happened seven years ago in Arkansas, when that state tried to accelerate the pace of executions. As the Death Penalty Information Center puts it, “The four executions actually conducted during Arkansas’s unprecedented execution schedulewere mired in controversy. The spree included the country’s first double execution in nearly 17 years, at least two of the executions were botched, and one of the people executed had serious claims of innocence that were never reviewed by Arkansas courts.”

It can also learn from Oklahoma, which encounteredsimilar problems after it attempted to increase the frequency of executions.

In addition, the risk of error in South Carolina is high because the state will be using either what the death-row inmates rightly deem “antiquated” execution methods or a one-dose lethal-injection protocol that has never been used in the state.

Their motion also noted:

“If a method is used and is botched, or otherwise reveals itself to be ‘more inhumane,’ a compressed execution schedule might subject a prisoner to execution by a method that they would never have chosen” if they’d had more time to make an informed decision. ….

A longer time interval … would also enable the state corrections department staff to learn from their previous experience and make necessary adjustments to the execution process.

The inmates are also asking for a more deliberate pace of executions because of the heavy toll the process takes on prison staff and others who are involved in putting people to death.

That toll has been well documented. In 2022 NPR reported that “corrections personnel who participate in executing prisoners experience emotional trauma so profound that it changes their views about capital punishment.” The South Carolina death-row inmates argued that in the past, “members of the state Corrections’ execution team were reported to have developed substance abuse issues and mental illness such as depression, and one died by suicide.”

Rushing executions would only exacerbate those problems.

Finally, as the Charleston Post and Courier reports, those seeking a slower rate argue that “scheduling executions at a ‘more frenetic pace’ will result in hurried litigation and adjudication of any critical concerns that arise during the process leading up to the execution.” The condemned, the paper notes, are “often represented by the same attorneys,” aggravating these issues.

As the South Carolina Supreme Court considers how fast to carry out executions, it should remember that in the business of state killing, it is better to get it right than to get it done quickly. Everyone, regardless of their feelings on capital punishment, can only hope that in South Carolina and elsewhere, there is no place for execution on an assembly line.