South Carolina Prisoner Chooses to Be Executed by Firing Squad

The South Carolina Division of Corrections mentioned final month that it had spent about $53,000 to renovate a death chamber at a prison on the outskirts of Columbia, putting in bullet-resistant glass between the chamber and witness room. A spokeswoman for the jail company mentioned prisoners who selected the firing squad can be strapped to a chair and a hood can be positioned on them. Three volunteer jail workers would then hearth rifles on the individual’s coronary heart.

The company made the renovations after South Carolina lawmakers designated electrocution as the brand new default methodology of execution. The invoice was sponsored by Republicans, however one of many lawmakers who proposed the firing squad different was State Senator Dick Harpootlian, a Democrat and former prosecutor who mentioned he had finished so as a result of he believed the electrical chair was inhumane.

“I imagine the firing squad is way more instantaneous, a lot much less painful,” Mr. Harpootlian mentioned.

He mentioned he supported the dying penalty in solely probably the most excessive instances and believed that Mr. Moore shouldn’t be killed.

“I don’t assume he matches the ‘worst of the worst’ class,” Mr. Harpootlian mentioned. “If I have been prosecuting the case, I’d not have sought the dying penalty.”

Mr. Moore didn’t have a gun when he entered Nikki’s Speedy Mart, a comfort retailer in Spartanburg County, S.C., at about 3 a.m. on Sept. 16, 1999. In some unspecified time in the future, he and the shop clerk, James Mahoney, engaged in a dispute, and Mr. Moore shot him with a gun that was stored behind the counter by the shop’s proprietor. Mr. Moore, who was shot within the arm in the course of the altercation, fled after grabbing a bag of cash totaling about $1,400. A jury convicted Mr. Moore in 2001 and advisable that he be executed.

Attorneys for Mr. Moore had earlier requested the State Supreme Courtroom to seek out that the dying sentence in his case was excessive, noting that he had entered the shop with out a gun and that there have been contradictory claims about what led to the dispute between the boys. The courtroom rejected that argument, although one justice, Kaye Hearn, issued a blistering dissent, saying that the state’s system for reviewing dying sentences “is damaged” and that, in her view, Mr. Moore’s sentence was disproportionate to his crime.