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South Carolina offers the electric chair or the execution to prisoners on death row

2021-05-19T10:25:20.547Z


Until now, the inmates have opted for lethal injection, knowing that there are no drugs necessary for it to be applied.


An electric chair in Columbia, South Carolina, in a 2019 photo.Kinard Lisbon / AP

South Carolina has not executed any of the 37 men waiting their turn on death row in a decade. The reason is simple: the method that convicts choose for their death is lethal injection and correctional facilities do not have one of the necessary drugs so that the inmate does not suffer a long and excruciating death. Until now, the legislation of that southern state allowed them to choose between lethal injection and the electric chair, so the prisoners opted for the first option and thus postponed their final day.

Until last Friday, when the Republican governor, Henry McMaster, fulfilled what he promised: to sign "as soon as it arrived at his desk" the bill that the House had approved a week before - under Republican control (66-43) - in which it is established that if there are no stocks of the necessary drugs, the prisoner must be executed with the electric chair without further delay. The regulation also passed the Senate vote. But the law contains a provision that introduces another option for the convicted person, in addition to the electric chair, to die in front of a firing squad. This law makes South Carolina the fourth state in the Union to include shooting as an alternative, after Mississippi, Oklahoma and Utah.

For those who opposed the law, the option of execution is a step backwards, since it is a practice that they consider “medieval”. Supporters of the death penalty believe that being able to execute those convicted of their crimes allows the families of the victims to close the chapter. “We are one step closer to providing victims' families and loved ones with the justice and closure that the law owes them. I will sign this legislation as soon as it reaches my desk, ”the Governor of South Carolina said in a statement.

“It is 2021. We should leave behind these barbaric forms of punishment that are more medieval than modern.

Our State has stepped back and I am ashamed, ”House Democratic Leader Todd Rutherford said in a statement after the bill passed the House vote.

More information

  • President Trump's latest death sentences

The approval of the new legislation does not imply the immediate reactivation of executions in South Carolina, since the law will surely face lawsuits that can delay its entry into force by several years. According to data from the DPIC, in 2021 there are no executions scheduled in South Carolina. If there are no pardons or postponements, the next execution will be carried out on May 19 in Texas, the third state with the highest number of prisoners on death row, 210. First is California, with 711, and second , Florida, with 347.

The change in the South Carolina law comes as the states of the country that continue to practice the death penalty - a total of 27 out of 50 - continue to encounter barriers to executing those sentenced to the maximum penalty due to a shortage of one of the three drugs used to end the life of the sentenced person.

The problem is not new and has been dragging on for more than a decade, when in the fall of 2010 the prisons ran out of sodium pentothal, the anesthetic that was used in capital punishment to put the inmate to sleep before injecting them into the vein. two other substances that end his life.

So Hospira, the only pharmaceutical company making sodium pentothal in the US, announced that it was having trouble meeting demand.

Officially, it alleged logistical problems and difficulty in obtaining certain ingredients, but behind it was the company's desire not to want to be associated with the death penalty any longer.

Almost immediately, in Italy - the country where one of the ingredients used by Hospira was manufactured - experienced great media pressure so that no more anesthesia for death row was sold to the United States.

In 2012, a Texas inmate became the first inmate to be executed by lethal injection composed of a single substance, pentobarbital, due to the impossibility of providing himself with two of the drugs that were part of the combination, pancuronium bromide and sodium thiopentate. .

The controversy was served, since pentobarbital is a barbiturate that is usually used to sacrifice animals.

According to the DPIC (Death Penalty Information Center), since the Supreme Court restored the death penalty in the US after a four-year hiatus, 1,532 people have been executed. Only three have been by firing squad and all of them in Utah. The last time was in 2010. Ronnie Lee Gardner, 49, voluntarily chose to be shot after spending 25 years on death row instead of undergoing a lethal injection because he believed him to be "more humane." Utah was the first state to opt for execution after the anesthesia shortage began in the desperate - and impossible - search for a human execution method in which the condemned person did not have a slow and long agony due to the lack of this barbiturate. at the time of giving the lethal injection.

The firing squad in Utah has a grim staging. The condemned man is tied to a chair with his head covered with a hood and a target is hung from his chest. Five agents of the Department of Prisons act as executioners and all five are armed, but one of them fires blank bullets. The execution room is a twenty-by-twenty-foot room, whose glass is bulletproof and opaque, to protect witnesses "physically and emotionally," according to the Utah Bureau of Prisons. At the moment, in South Carolina there is no established procedure to shoot those sentenced to death, since this method has never been used.

The adoption by the United States of lethal injection was the result of more than a century in the search for a 'humane' way to end the lives of those sentenced to death, which began with the hanging and firing squad.

These methods were followed by electrocution (the first electric chair arrived in 1890) and the gas chamber (1921).

In a macabre act of evolution and after an Oklahoma coroner considered that "animals with more humanity were being killed with which people were being killed", the lethal injection was born in 1977, the cocktail of three drugs that puts an end to the life of a prisoner sentenced to capital punishment.

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Source: elparis

All news articles on 2021-05-19

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