South Carolina is ready for death by firing squad after shortage of lethal injection drugs left 37 on death row waiting execution

Daily Mail UK ^ | March 18, 2022 | Ronny Reyes

[Morgana]

South Carolina has given the greenlight to firing-squad executions, a method codified into state law last year after a decade-long pause in carrying out death sentences because of the state´s inability to procure lethal injection drugs.

The state Corrections Department said Friday that renovations have been completed on the death chamber in Columbia and that the agency had notified Attorney General Alan Wilson that it was able to carry out a firing-squad execution.

The state had blocked executions last May after its new capital punishment law allowed death row inmates to choose death by electrocutions, lethal injection or firing squad, with the state not having the proper procedures in place for the later two options.

It allowed death row inmates Brad Sigmon and Freddie Owens, both convicted murderers, to delay their executions for a lack of options, but if the state Supreme Court approves the new firing squad policies, they could be the first to be executed by the method in 12 years.

According to officials, the death chamber now also includes a metal chair, with restraints, in the corner of the room in which inmates will sit if they choose execution by firing squad. That chair faces a wall with a rectangular opening, 15 feet away, through which the three shooters will fire their weapons.

State officials also have created protocols for carrying out the executions. The three shooters, all volunteers who are employees of the Corrections Department, will have rifles loaded with live ammunition, with their weapons trained on the inmate's heart.

[Doc91678]

I didn’t say that there would be a blank. I said you tell the
shooters that one rifle contains a blank.

[Doc91678]

Smoking is bad for your health...

[GingisK]

They could just hire a Muslim with a sword.

[zeugma]

This is stupid. Everyone knows it will get struck down by the courts for whatever stupid liberal reasons they can come up with. These types of controversies are just kept up by the political class to keep everyone riled up about something that is of no real consequence.

If you want to have executions, it is so brain dead simple to set up that even a liberal could do it.
1. Build an airtight enclosure.
2. Wheel the condemned into the enclosure strapped down on a gurney.
3. Pump the enclosure with pure nitrogen. Put oxygen sensors both inside and outside of the enclosure.
4. Wait 15 minutes.
5. Vent the enclosure to the roof of whatever building you are in while cycling in ambient air.

This is no-muss no-fuss execution. The condemned won’t even know he’s dead when he passes. 78% of every breath you take is nitrogen. There are no unusual chemicals, poisons, or anything else to get people riled up over. No doctors must violate their hippocratic oaths.

Every industry that deals with nitrogen in any volume understands the safety requirements you have to put in place so that people do not enter a pure nitrogen atmosphere. A person in such a situation will simply collapse and die without warning because nitrogen saturation does not trigger an asphyxiation response in the body.

Some will doubtless complain that the condemned will not suffer, and while that is true, it is also true that he will definitely be quite and fully dead, which I figure is the point of the exercise.

Using anything else is just stupidity. You don’t even have to do anything special to the room/enclosure afterwards, because the only thing that was in the room was normal air. Just be sure to check the oxygen sensors before you walk in.

[blackdog]

You just described the kill floor I used to maintain. Instead of nitrogen it was co2.

[zeugma]

# Instead of nitrogen it was co2

The problem with that is that elevated CO2 levels will trigger an asphyxiation response. With Nitrogen you just die and never even realize it.