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South Carolina House of Representatives
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The South Carolina House of Representatives has voted to add firing squad to execution methods in the state.
The aim is to speed up the executions.
The bill, passed by 66 votes to 43, provides that convicted inmates will either be shot or executed by the electric chair when drugs are not available for lethal injection.
No one has been executed recently in South Carolina because these funds have expired and supplies are unavailable.
The prisoners, who, according to the current legal situation, can choose between the electric chair and the lethal injection, therefore choose the latter in order to avoid execution for the time being.
The last death row inmate was executed in South Carolina ten years ago.
From 2000 to 2010 there were an average of just under two executions per year.
The decline in the number of executions is not only due to a lack of medication, but also to a change in the procedure of the public prosecutors, who are increasingly relying on confessions of guilt with life sentences instead of death penalty trials.
Governor Henry McMaster wants to sign law
South Carolina is one of nine states that still use the electric chair and will be the fourth along with Mississippi, Oklahoma and Utah to allow firing squad.
The Senate had already approved the bill in March, and Republican Governor Henry McMaster announced that he would sign it.
Democratic MPs failed with several amendments to the bill.
Among other things, they had called for the new execution rules not to apply to current inmates on death row or for the death penalty to be banned completely.
bbr / AP