South Carolina carries out first firing squad execution in US in 15 years

By Aleksandra Michalska and Jonathan Allen

COLUMBIA, South Carolina (Reuters) -South Carolina executed a convicted murderer by firing squad on Friday, the first use of the method in the United States in 15 years.

Brad Sigmon, 67, chose to be killed by a firing squad, saying he feared the alternatives of the electric chair or lethal injection would risk a slower and more torturous death.

Sigmon was pronounced dead at 6:08 p.m. ET, according to Chrysti Shain, a spokesperson for the South Carolina Department of Corrections.

Sigmon was convicted of beating to death his ex-girlfriend's parents, William and Gladys Larke, with a baseball bat at their home in the town of Taylors in 2001.

Executioners strapped him into a chair in a steel basin with a hood over his head and a target over his heart at the South Carolina Department of Corrections' execution chamber in Columbia. Three executioners fired live ammunition from 15 feet (4.5 meters) away.

Shain said that Sigmon's attorney, Bo King, read Sigmon's last statement to witnesses just before the execution, in which the inmate said he wanted to convey "a calling to my fellow Christians to help us end the death penalty."

Three media witnesses to the execution said during a press conference afterward that Sigmon was dressed in a black jumpsuit and had a bullseye attached to his chest.

There was no warning when the three executioners fired at Sigmon, shots that took place simultaneously. Witnesses flinched when the shots were fired, but there was little reaction beyond that, the media witnesses said.

After he was shot, Sigmon appeared to take two short breaths and a blood stain appeared on his chest. He was pronounced dead about three minutes after the shots were fired, the media witnesses said.

A few hours before the scheduled execution time, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected Sigmon's final petition to halt his killing. The court, in a brief unsigned notice with no noted dissents, denied his application, which argued that South Carolina's refusal to share information about its lethal injection protocol violated his due-process rights.

The last three men to be executed by South Carolina all chose lethal injection, and the executions lasted for about 20 minutes before they were declared dead, Sigmon's lawyer, King, said in an interview before the execution.

Sigmon "was left to decide whether to die by the firing squad, knowing that the bullets are going to break the bones in his chest and destroy his heart, or risk a 20-minute-long execution strapped to a gurney with your lungs filling with blood and fluid," King said. "This is an impossible choice."

There have been only three executions in the U.S. by firing squad since 1976 when the death penalty was reinstated in the U.S. All three were in Utah, one of only five states that still offers a method that was common in the 19th century during the Civil War.

Most U.S. executions use lethal injection, introduced in the 1970s as a less outwardly violent method. But it has become the most frequently botched means of execution, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

Some states have struggled to secure the drugs needed because of a European Union ban on pharmaceutical companies selling drugs for use in capital punishment.

Executioners have also sometimes struggled to find veins on prisoners' bodies. And autopsies of people executed by lethal injection have sometimes found frothy, bloody liquid filling the lungs' airways, which some doctors say indicate the condemned person experienced the painful sensation of drowning before they died.

(Reporting by Aleksandra Michalska in Columbia, South Carolina, and Jonathan Allen in New York; Editing by Cynthia Osterman, Deepa Babington and Sandra Maler)