Condemned South Carolina killer chooses to be executed by firing squad

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — Condemned South Carolina inmate Brad Sigmon has chosen to die next month by a firing squad. He would be the first U.S. inmate shot to death in an execution in 15 years.

Sigmon is scheduled to die March 7. On Friday, he became the first South Carolina inmate to choose the state’s new firing squad over lethal injection or the electric chair.

Only three inmates in the U.S. have been executed by firing squad since 1976. All were in Utah, with the last one taking place in 2010.

Sigmon, 67, will be strapped to a chair and have a hood placed over his head and a target placed over his heart in the death chamber. Three volunteers will fire at him through a small opening about 15 feet (4.6 meters) away.

Lawyers for Sigmon asked to delay his execution date earlier this month because they wanted to learn if the prisoner in South Carolina’s previous execution, Marion Bowman, was given two doses of pentobarbital at his execution on Jan. 31 and look over his autopsy report.

The justices rejected his delay and court records Friday have not indicated if Sigmon’s lawyers have received Bowman’s autopsy report yet.

Sigmon didn’t pick the electric chair because it would “burn and cook him alive,” his attorney Gerald “Bo” King wrote in a statement.

“But the alternative is just as monstrous,” King said. “If he chose lethal injection, he risked the prolonged death suffered by all three of the men South Carolina has executed since September — three men Brad knew and cared for — who remained alive, strapped to a gurney, for more than twenty minutes.”

Sigmon knows it will be a violent death, his lawyer said.

“He does not wish to inflict that pain on his family, the witnesses, or the execution team. But, given South Carolina’s unnecessary and unconscionable secrecy, Brad is choosing as best he can,” King said.

Sigmon was convicted in the 2001 baseball bat killings of his ex-girlfriend’s parents at their home in Greenville County. They were in separate rooms, and Sigmon went back and forth as he beat them to death, investigators said. He then kidnapped his ex-girlfriend at gunpoint, but she escaped from his car. He shot at her as she ran but missed, according to prosecutors.