The curtain shrieked as it was yanked open to reveal a 67-year-old man tied to a chair. His arms were pulled uncomfortably behind his back. The red bull’s-eye target on his chest rose and fell as he desperately attempted to still his breathing.
The man, Brad Sigmon, smiled at his attorney, Bo King, seated in the front row before guards placed a black bag over his head. King said Sigmon appeared to be trying his best to put on a brave face for those who had come to bear witness.
That was the kind of person Sigmon had become after his decades on death row, the kind who fretted over other people’s comfort at his own execution. Sigmon had agonized over the fact that his loved ones would have to see him die like this, gunned down, mere feet away from them.
It was one of those moments where every second felt like an hour.
He had been faced with an impossible choice, if you can call it that. Die by lethal injection, electrocution, or firing squad? Firing squad, he concluded, seemed the most humane. Now, he found himself strapped down, waiting for those three rifles pointed at his beating heart to fire.
Sigmon struggled in the chair as the sound of gunfire erupted and bullets tore through his chest. “He was pulling on the restraints so hard … I feel he was trying to cover the wound,” said King, who serves as chief of the Capital Habeas Unit for the Fourth Circuit. “It was one of those moments where every second felt like an hour.”
But within three minutes, the nightmarish ordeal was over. Blood glistened off of Sigmon’s black shirt, as the medical examiner called a time of death.
“6:08 p.m.”
Only later did King realize why his client was really dressed in black. Not for its slimming properties, as Sigmon had joked moments earlier, but because it hid the distinctive dark-red color of blood.
On March 7, 2025, Sigmon, who was convicted of a 2001 double homicide, became the first man executed by firing squad in the United States in 15 years. Others are expected to follow.
In July, the South Carolina Supreme Court resumed executions after a 13-year pause. Prior to the ruling, state lawmakers passed a law allowing people set to be executed to choose between lethal injection, electrocution, or firing squad. The law was passed as a way to skirt shortages of lethal injection drugs and arguments that the death penalty was a cruel or unusual punishment because, in theory, people on death row were given options. Only, as King notes, the choice between being effectively cooked alive, drowning in your own blood and fluids as a result of a mystery cocktail of drugs that repeatedly fails, or being shot to death isn’t much of a choice.
This is especially true because despite Sigmon’s legal team’s best efforts, the state refused to share information about the drug protocol with his attorneys, leaving him to make the critical decision about his execution method without enough information on the drugs being used, how it would impact him, or even if they were expired or not.
Four men have already been executed in South Carolina in the last seven months. The first three men were executed by lethal injection, while Sigmon was executed by firing squad. Fifteen more executions are expected to take place nationwide over the next year.
Firing squad executions are rare in the U.S., with only four since 1976 — three of them in Utah. By the time the lethal injection protocol was introduced in the 1980s, firing squad executions had grown to be considered antiquated and inhumane. Death by electrocution has also become less common, as witnesses have described gruesome scenes of prisoner’s effectively cooked from the inside out, with their flesh swelling and stretching until their heart gives out. Yet mounting evidence suggests lethal injection may be similarly brutal. Research suggests the paralytic involved in lethal injections merely masks the pain, and that those killings are indeed among the most painful and frequently botched methods of execution.
On April 11, Mikal Mahdi is set to be the second man executed by firing squad in the state’s history. Mahdi was accused of multiple killings, including the murder of a police officer. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced in 2004, but his attorneys argue that he never should have been given the death penalty because his extensive history of abuse, mental illness, and trauma wasn’t properly presented to the judge. They also argue that since his sentencing, society has gained a deeper understanding of how these issues impact decision-making.
One of his attorneys, David Weiss, noted that since his arrest at the age of 21, Mahdi has become practically a different person. Weiss said that Mahdi loves to read nonfiction, keep up with current events, and even paint for his fellow death-row inmates upon request.
If South Carolina does move forward with executing Mikal, they’re not going to be executing the same person.
“If South Carolina does move forward with executing Mikal, they’re not going to be executing the same person,” said Weiss. “And you see that a lot in capital cases where people get older, oftentimes in cases like Mikal’s where people were very young at the time that their crimes were committed, they changed a tremendous amount over the years in prison.”
There are parallels between Mahdi’s story and Sigmon’s. Both men suffered from unaddressed trauma, and both appear to have changed dramatically as the years stretched on with them behind bars.
Sigmon had always been a deeply religious man. “He expressed deep remorse at his jury trial, and he arrived on death row and just threw himself into study and prayer,” said King. “He was spending a lot of time trying to work toward some redemption through repentance and also an understanding of his faith.”
King said that he served as a sort of unofficial chaplain for his fellow death-row members, who he called “brothers.” For his last meal, he’d even requested three buckets of original-recipe Kentucky Fried Chicken to share with his “brothers.” His request was ultimately denied.
As for Mahdi, his request for mercy is still ongoing.
Attorneys for Mahdi note that at his original trial, the arguments made in favor of a life sentence over the death penalty only lasted for 30 minutes, which couldn’t begin to cover the lifetime of trauma Mahdi suffered. As a young child, his mother was forced to leave after suffering abuse at the hands of his father. From there, his life continued to get worse. His father pulled him from school in fifth grade. Mahdi was in and out of juvenile facilities and prison, where he was subjected to solitary confinement, up until his final arrest at 21.
The fact that this wasn’t properly explained to the judge at the time is at the heart of Mahdi’s case. “This goes well beyond a typical claim about ineffective assistance of counsel and was just really an egregious miscarriage of justice,” said Weiss.
In Sigmon’s final words, read aloud by King, he prayed for a world where Mahdi and his other brothers on death row would never have to die the way he did.
“I want my closing statement to be one of love,” he wrote, “and a calling to my fellow Christians to end the death penalty.”
Source: theintercept.com, Jessica Washington, April 5, 2025
"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted."
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted."
— Oscar Wilde
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