\n<\/p>\n
The curtain shrieked<\/span> as it was yanked open to reveal a 67-year-old man tied to a chair. His arms were pulled <\/a>uncomfortably behind his back. The red bull\u2019s-eye target on his chest rose and fell as he desperately attempted to still his breathing.<\/p>\n The man, Brad Sigmon, smiled at his attorney, Bo King, seated in the front row before guards placed a black bag over his head. King said Sigmon appeared to be trying his best to put on a brave face for those who had come to bear witness.<\/p>\n That was the kind of person Sigmon had become after his decades on death row, the kind who fretted over other people\u2019s comfort at his own execution. Sigmon had agonized over the fact that his loved ones would have to see him die like this, gunned down, mere feet away from them.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was one of those moments where every second felt like an hour.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n He had been faced with an impossible choice, if you can call it that. Die by lethal injection, electrocution, or firing squad? Firing squad, he concluded, seemed the most humane. Now, he found himself strapped down, waiting for those three rifles pointed at his beating heart to fire.<\/p>\n Sigmon struggled in the chair as the sound of gunfire erupted and bullets tore through his chest. \u201cHe was pulling on the restraints so hard \u2026 I feel he was trying to cover the wound,\u201d said King, who serves as chief of the Capital Habeas Unit for the Fourth Circuit. \u201cIt was one of those moments where every second felt like an hour.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n But within three minutes, the nightmarish ordeal was over. Blood glistened off of Sigmon\u2019s black shirt, as the medical examiner called a time of death.<\/p>\n \u201c6:08 p.m.\u201d<\/p>\n Only later did King realize why his client was really dressed in black. Not for its slimming properties, as Sigmon had joked moments earlier, but because it hid the distinctive dark-red color of blood.\u00a0<\/p>\n On March 7, 2025, Sigmon, who was convicted of a 2001 double homicide, became the first man executed by firing squad in the United States in 15 years. Others are expected to follow.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n In July, the South Carolina Supreme Court resumed executions after a 13-year pause. Prior to the ruling, state lawmakers passed a law allowing people set to be executed to choose between lethal injection, electrocution, or firing squad. The law was passed as a way to skirt shortages of lethal injection drugs<\/a> and arguments that the death penalty was a cruel or unusual punishment <\/a>because, in theory, people on death row were given options. Only, as King notes, the choice between being effectively cooked alive<\/a>, drowning in your own blood and fluids as a result of a mystery cocktail of drugs<\/a> that repeatedly fails<\/a>, or being shot to death isn\u2019t much of a choice.<\/p>\n This is especially true because despite Sigmon\u2019s legal team\u2019s best efforts, the state refused to share information about the drug protocol with his attorneys, leaving him to make the critical decision about his execution method without enough information on the drugs being used, how it would impact him, or even if they were expired or not.<\/p>\n Four men have already been executed in South Carolina in the last seven months. The first three men were executed by lethal injection, while Sigmon was executed by firing squad. Fifteen more executions are expected to take place nationwide over the next year.<\/p>\n Firing squad executions are rare in the U.S., with only four since 1976 \u2014 three of them in Utah. By the time the lethal injection protocol was introduced in the 1980s, firing squad executions had grown to be considered antiquated and inhumane. Death by electrocution has also become less common, as witnesses have described gruesome scenes of prisoner\u2019s effectively cooked from the inside out, with their flesh swelling and stretching until their heart gives out. Yet mounting evidence suggests lethal injection may be similarly brutal<\/a>. Research suggests the paralytic involved in lethal injections merely masks the pain, and that those killings are indeed among the most painful <\/a>and frequently<\/a> botched methods of execution<\/a>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n\n