South Carolina Supreme Court blocks firing squad execution

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South Carolina Supreme Court blocks firing squad execution

Cobi Burnett | U. Nevada Las Vegas School of Law, US

April 21, 2022 11:23:23 pm

The South Carolina Supreme Court Wednesday blocked the state from committing its first firing squad execution. Through the temporary stay, the planned execution of Richard Bernard Moore scheduled for April 29 has been put on hold. Moore was convicted and sentenced to death for the 1999 murder of a convenience store clerk, James Mahoney. The court said it will provide their reasoning in a detailed order at a later date.

Although the court denied his petition for a writ of habeas corpus earlier this month, it agreed last week to examine a legal challenge brought by Moore and three other death row inmates who have all reached their appeal limits. The inmates argue that electrocution and the firing squad are “barbaric” execution methods and ask the judge to examine prison officials’ claims that lethal injection drugs couldn’t be obtained for the executions instead. State officials have claimed that the hiatus between executions in the state—the last occurring in 2011—is due to the inability to acquire the lethal injection drugs. State officials say the last batch of lethal injection drugs expired in 2013.

To counteract this issue the South Carolina legislature passed Bill 200 in 2021, which made the electric chair the default method for execution. The bill allowed convicted persons to choose between firing squad and lethal injection options as alternatives, only if those options were available at the time of election. Moore had elected to be executed by firing squad, but later stated he was forced into the decision by state law, and found both options unconstitutional. His execution date was set after corrections officials made changes to the death chamber in an effort to accommodate the firing squad.

According to the Death Penalty Information Center, only eight states use the electric chair for executions, with only four allowing firing squads. The last firing squad execution came in Utah in 2010, and only three such executions have taken place in the US since 1976. Moore is asking a federal judge to consider whether these types of executions are unconstitutional and barred by the Eighth Amendment’s cruel and unusual punishment restriction. South Carolina currently has a death row population of 37.

Moore has been on death row for almost two decades after shooting Mahoney in the chest in Spartanburg, South Carolina. Moore’s lawyers claim that he could never have intended to kill anyone considering he entered the store without weapons on him. His attorneys plan to petition the US Supreme Court for a review on the proportionality of Moore’s sentence to his crime.

Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his Letter from Birmingham Jail

On April 16, 1963, an incarcerated Martin Luther King, Jr. (arrested for demonstrating in defiance of a court order) wrote his Letter from Birmingham Jail in response to a published statement by eight fellow clergymen from Alabama.

Part of the letter read: We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we stiff creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging dark of segregation to say, "Wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross-county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger," your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness" then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience. Read the full text of the Letter.