A bill that would make the electric chair the default method of execution in South Carolina took its first steps Thursday to becoming law.
The bill, which is aimed at combating a nationwide shortage in lethal injection drugs, was advanced by a subcommittee of lawmakers by a vote of three to two down party lines, with Republicans voting in favor.
Under current South Carolina law, lethal injection is the default mode of execution, but inmates can choose death by electrocution instead. If inmates choose lethal injection, the state cannot force them to die by means of electrocution.
Under the bill, offenders would still be given the choice between lethal injection or electrocution, but if the drugs needed to perform a lethal injection were not available, the death penalty would be carried out by electrocution.
The electric chair would very likely come back into use, if the bill becomes law.
Mirroring the national trend, South Carolina for years now has been out of usable lethal injection drugs. The shortage was caused by drug manufacturers that sought to clamp down on how their products were being used. Companies have even gone to court to block the usage of their products in executions.
The state Department of Corrections has sought out drugs to carry out executions since about 2016, Director Bryan Stirling told lawmakers Thursday. But when companies found out where Corrections employees worked, the companies turned them away, he said.
“We’ve exhausted all our abilities to find the drug,” Stirling told lawmakers.
South Carolina has not executed someone since 2011, and the last execution using the electric chair was in 2008, Stirling said.
Thus far, the shortage has caused the state to postpone two executions, and a third one will need to be postponed soon, Stirling said.
“The situation we’re talking about today is not theoretical,” subcommittee chairman Rep. Weston Newton, R-Beaufort, said.
Proponents of the bill argued Thursday that families of the victims of death row inmates need closure and aren’t getting it.
Spartanburg County Solicitor Barry Barnette testified that families involved in death penalty cases already have to wait through years of appeals to see offenders’ sentences come to fruition with the scheduling of their executions.
“The victims deserve for these sentences to be carried out,” Barnette said.
Barnette said he wasn’t necessarily in favor of using electrocution as the default method of execution, but urged lawmakers to find some way to carry out the death penalty.
S.C. Rep. Justin Bamberg, D-Bamberg, questioned whether the bill would affect families currently waiting on death penalties to be carried out. Because those on death row were sentenced to death under current law, which allows them to choose lethal injection, Bamberg questioned whether, even if the law changes, the state would be able to apply it to those inmates.
Barnette compared Bamberg’s question to a period of time when the United States outlawed the death penalty from 1968 to 1976. After the death penalty was reinstated, those sentenced to life because they could not be sentenced to death during the period of abolition did not have their penalties changed. One notable example of this was South Carolina serial killer Donald “Pee Wee” Gaskins, though Gaskins was later sentenced to death for killing a fellow inmate while incarcerated.
To address that problem, Barnette said he would support measures in the bill that would make it apply retroactively to those already on death row.
Opponents of the bill argued that the death penalty isn’t applied evenly and can sometimes be given to people who are ultimately found innocent.
“The bill misses the underlying issue,” said Frank Knaack, the executive director of the S.C. chapter of the ACLU. “It concerns us that we’re debating the method of execution when we have a system that’s unreliable and arbitrary.”
In the past, some Democrats have argued that the bill gives inmates the “façade” of choice when it comes to the death penalty and that it violates the part of the Bill of Rights that protects Americans from cruel and unusual punishment.
Republicans have tried to pass this bill in previous years and failed. Last session, the bill managed to pass the Senate by a vote of 26 to 13 and made it through the House Judiciary Committee before it stalled out when the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the legislative session.
Republicans are much better situated to pass the bill this year. In November, the GOP won seats in both the House and the Senate, strengthening their ability to derail any Democratic effort to stop the bill.
The bill also has the strong support of S.C. Gov. Henry McMaster, who has called for its passage for the last three years as the state struggled to carry out scheduled executions.
Source: thestate.com, Emily Bohatch, February 11, 2021. Emily Bohatch helps cover South Carolina’s government for The State. She also updates The State’s databases. Her accomplishments include winning multiple awards for her coverage of South Carolina’s prison system.
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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde
