Looks like South Carolina is giving death row inmates a choice of how they are executed. The state hasn’t put any criminals to death for about 10 years because the drugs to do so haven’t been readily available.
AP reports that South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster signed a bill into law recently that makes inmates choose their own fate [1].
That’s pretty nice of the state. The people that these criminals murdered didn’t get a choice of what happened to them.
I actually think that the families of the victims should be the ones who choose how the death row inmates are executed. Why are we letting these murderers choose anything?
And I think they should have a much larger pool of choices. In addition to lethal injection, firing squad or electric chair, the families of the victims should be able to choose from various methods of killing: drowning, fire, bow and arrow, snake bite, pushing the criminal off a cliff, dropping the inmate from an airplane, throwing them in front of a car, bear mauling, stabbing, boiling in oil, Twinkie overdose or Anthrax.
The inmates, as you would expect, aren’t happy about this new law and some have appealed. They say they were sentenced under an older law that said they would be lethally injected. They want the old way that isn’t quite so painful – plus they know they will stay alive longer because the state can’t get the execution drugs anytime soon.
The law says that lethal injection is still the default method of killing if the drugs are available – but if not, it requires the inmates to be killed by electric chair or firing squad.
Surprisingly, three other states allow a firing squad. Those are Utah, Oklahoma and Mississippi.
And, of course, like everything else in our country, this new law is being called racist. Frank Knaack, executive director of the state chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union said, “In the midst of a national reckoning around systemic racism, our Governor ensured that South Carolina’s death penalty – a system rooted in racial terror and lynchings – is maintained.”