South Carolina’s highest court stays firing squad execution set for next week – Local News 8

By Amanda Musa and Steve Almasy, CNN

South Carolina’s Supreme Courtroom issued a brief keep of execution Wednesday for Richard Bernard Moore, who was scheduled to be the primary particular person executed by firing squad within the state.

Lindsey Vann, certainly one of Moore’s attorneys, instructed CNN final week that they requested the state’s highest court docket to place the execution on maintain in an effort to give them time to attraction his conviction to the US Supreme Courtroom.

Moore, who was sentenced to dying for the 1999 homicide of a comfort retailer clerk, was scheduled to be executed April 29. In a court docket submitting final week, he selected firing squad over the electrical chair..

He didn’t have the choice of selecting deadly injection, as South Carolina doesn’t have the required medicine, in accordance with the submitting. The state Division of Corrections beforehand instructed CNN it has not been in possession of a usable dose of deadly injection medicine since 2013.

Moore selected to die by firing squad however added in a press release he is not going to lose hope in two pending court docket challenges to the constitutionality of the state’s dying penalty methodology.

“I imagine this election is forcing me to decide on between two unconstitutional strategies of execution, and I don’t intend to waive any challenges to electrocution or firing squad by making an election,” he mentioned within the assertion.

He selected firing squad, as required 14 days earlier than the date of his execution, as a result of “I extra strongly oppose dying by electrocution,” he wrote.

Moore, 57, could be the primary particular person executed in South Carolina in additional than a decade.

Final yr, the state Legislature handed a legislation that made electrocution the state’s major execution methodology, although dying row prisoners have the choice to decide on a firing squad or deadly injection as an alternative if the choices can be found.

On April 6, the South Carolina Supreme Courtroom denied an attraction by Moore that argued his dying sentence was disproportionate to penalties imposed in related instances.

South Carolina is certainly one of 4 states — Mississippi, Oklahoma and Utah are the others — the place execution by firing squad is authorized.

Jeffrey Motts was the final particular person executed within the state, having died by deadly injection in Might 2011. The final dying by electrocution was in June 2008 when James Reed was executed.

Solely three inmates in america have been executed by firing squad, in accordance with the Dying Penalty Info Middle. The newest was Ronnie Gardner in Utah in June 2010.

There are 35 folks on dying row in South Carolina.

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CNN’s Elizabeth Wolfe and Andy Rose contributed to this report.