South Carolina executes Stephen Bryant

South Carolina executes killer who left bloody message, marking third firing-squad execution this year

A South Carolina man convicted of killing 3 people over 5 days more than 20 years ago was executed by a firing squad on Friday evening.

Stephen Bryant, 44, was executed for killing a man in his home and writing "catch me if u can" on the wall with the victim's blood. He was pronounced dead at 6:05 p.m. following a firing squad. Three prison employees, all with live ammunition, volunteered to carry out the execution. Bryant is the 3rd man this year to die by South Carolina's newest execution method.

Bryant chose to die by firing squad instead of lethal injection or the electric chair. According to The Independent, his final meal was a seafood stir fry and chocolate cake, and when the time of his execution came he did not give a final statement. He briefly glanced at the 10 witnesses before the hood was placed on his head.

The shots rang out about 55 seconds later. Bryant made no noise. The red bullseye target that marks the location of his heart flew forward off his chest. He had a few shallow breaths and then a final spasm a little over a minute later. A doctor checked him with a stethoscope for before he pronounced Bryant dead.

The state has used a firing squad to put to death three of 5 inmates this year.

Lawyers for Bryant filed a last-minute appeal, arguing the sentencing judge never considered the severe brain damage he suffered due to his mother's drug and alcohol use during pregnancy. The Supreme Court declined in October to review Bryant's death sentence.

Bryant was convicted in the 2004 killing of a man in his home, and investigators said he burned Willard "TJ" Tietjen's eyes with cigarettes after shooting him and painting on the wall with the victim's blood.

Prosecutors said he also shot and killed 2 other men he was giving rides to as they were relieving themselves on the side of the road during a few weeks that terrorized Sumter County in October 2004.

In March, South Carolina carried out the nation's 1st execution by firing squad in 15 years. The state has used a firing squad to put to death three of 5 inmates this year.

Bryant is the 7th person put to death by South Carolina in 14 months after the state had a 13-year pause in executions when it couldn't obtain lethal injection drugs.

Convicted double murderer Brad Sigmon was executed by firing squad in March this year, having opted for the execution method over lethal injection or electric chair and becoming the first person in 15 years to face the method of execution in the US after Ronnie Lee Gardner was put to death in 2010 in Utah.

A witness to Sigmon's execution who had seen 10 previous death row sentences carried out said that he'd found it a 'faster' and 'more violent' method than the other ways, and that nothing he'd seen before prepared him for it.

A month later, fellow death row inmate Mikal Mahdi was also executed by firing squad and his attorneys pointed towards his autopsy report claiming that he had been shot lower down in the body than expected, the bullets missing his heart, and that he had not been pronounced dead until four minutes after he was shot.

The South Carolina Department of Corrections 'strongly refuted' the claims that they had botched the execution, insisting that all three bullets had struck Madhi's heart.

South Carolina turned to the firing squad as it struggled to find alternative methods to execute condemned inmates. By the early 2010s, the state had run out of lethal injection drugs, and no manufacturer would sell more without anonymity, a condition the law didn't permit.

Judges refused to schedule executions if electrocution was the only option. As a result, executions halted for 13 years, and death row cases began to stack up.

No South Carolina governor has offered clemency since the death penalty resumed in the United States in 1976.

Death row executions in the U.S. are on the rise, after creeping upward since the pandemic, when the country's use of the death penalty reached a historic low.

43 executions have been carried out so far in 2025 and 3 were scheduled for this week, but only two took place: one in Florida and Bryant's in South Carolina. An execution was scheduled in Oklahoma on Thursday, but Oklahoma's governor commuted the sentence of the inmate condemned in his state.

At least 14 others are scheduled to be put to death during the remainder of 2025 and next year.

Bryant becomes the 5th condemned inmate to be put to death this year in South Carolina and the 50th overall since the state resumed capital punishment on January 11, 1985.

Bryant becomes the 43rd condemned inmate to be put to death this year in the USA and the 1,650th overall since the nation resumed executions on January 17, 1977.

Source: CBS News, Staff, Rick Halperin, November 14, 2025

"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted."

— Oscar Wilde

Comments

Oklahoma | Richard Glossip on Life After Decades on Death Row

In an exclusive interview at home in Oklahoma City, Glossip describes his first days of freedom in a world he hasn’t experienced for nearly 30 years. For three decades, Richard Glossip lived on concrete. First at the Oklahoma County jail, after his arrest for murder in 1997, and then in the underground bunker housing death row inmates at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary. As with the rest of his surroundings, he eventually got used to the hard, unforgiving floors, although recently he’d developed painful swelling in his legs.

Can the state execute a man who already survived? | Opinion

A second execution would be an unimaginable nightmare for Tony Carruthers and a moral horror for the rest of us. Tony Carruthers is not supposed to be alive . On May 21, Tennessee set out to execute him. It failed. Carruthers survived. He is not the first person to survive an execution in the United States, and he won’t be the last. For Carruthers, the question is: Now what? Will the state seek to arrange a second execution?

Florida | 2-time Jacksonville baby abuser is set for execution

Thirty years ago while on probation for fracturing an infant’s skull, Andrew Lukehart inflicted at least five blows to the head of another baby, then concocted a story that she was abducted before eventually leading authorities to her body in a swamp area. At 6 p.m. Tuesday, June 2, the 53-year-old from Jacksonville is set to become Florida’s eighth man on death row to be executed in 2026. He will become the 36th under Gov. Ron DeSantis after a record 19 inmates were executed by the state in 2025, including another from Duval County: Michael Bell.

20 Minutes to Death: Witness to the Last Execution in France

The following document is a firsthand account of the final moments of Hamida Djandoubi, a convicted murderer executed by guillotine at Marseille’s Baumettes Prison on September 10, 1977. The record—dated September 9—was written by Monique Mabelly, a judge appointed by the state to witness the proceedings. Djandoubi’s execution would ultimately be the last carried out in France before capital punishment was abolished in 1981. At the time, President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing—who had publicly voiced his "deep aversion to the death penalty" prior to his election—rejected Djandoubi’s appeal for clemency. Choosing to let "justice take its course," the President allowed the execution to proceed, just as he had in two previous cases during his term: Christian Ranucci , executed on July 28, 1976 and Jérôme Carrein , executed on June 23, 1977. Hamida Djandoubi , a Tunisian national, was sentenced to death for killing his former lover, Elisabeth Bousquet. He was execu...

New Mississippi billboard warns criminals: ‘Firing squad is legal’

DESOTO COUNTY, Miss. (WREG) — A billboard standing on Interstate 55 southbound as you cross the Tennessee state line and enter Mississippi from Memphis is sending a grim message to those coming into the state. DeSoto County District Attorney Matthew Barton recently announced the new billboard campaign, which features the sign reading, “WELCOME TO MISSISSIPPI. WHERE THE FIRING SQUAD IS LEGAL. THINK TWICE.” It references Mississippi’s law permitting execution by firing squad under certain circumstances for inmates sentenced to death. Barton says this campaign is aimed at deterring violent crime and sends a direct message to criminals entering Mississippi.

Iran executes Esma Zarei in Ardabil Prison after she gave birth in custody

Hengaw – Saturday, May 23, 2026. Iranian authorities have executed Esma Zarei, a 28-year-old Turkish woman from Parsabad in Ardabil Province, who had previously been sentenced to death on charges of “premeditated murder” in connection with the killing of her husband. She is the sixth woman executed in Iran since the beginning of 2026. According to information received by Hengaw Organization for Human Rights, Zarei was executed at dawn on Wednesday, May 20, 2026, in Ardabil Central Prison. She had been sentenced to qisas (retribution-in-kind) after being convicted of her husband’s murder.

Tennessee | Questions Raised About the Doctor Who Was Overseeing Tony Caruthers’ Execution

Mark Fowler, according to a deposition, had not placed a central line in a patient for more than a decade when he attempted to put one in Carruthers Around 11 a.m. Thursday morning in the execution chamber at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, a medical doctor stepped in and attempted to place a central IV line in Tony Carruthers’ chest. By that point, the prison staff had spent some 30 minutes trying unsuccessfully to insert a backup IV line that would allow them to proceed with the lethal injection. According to Carruthers’ attorney Maria DeLiberato, who was in the room, after asking a staff member to attempt inserting a line through Carruthers’ jugular vein, the doctor moved on to the central line, which is identified as the last resort in Tennessee’s lethal injection protocol .

Florida executes Andrew Richard Lukehart

Jacksonville man who killed his girlfriend’s 5-month-old baby in 1996 executed 30 years later A Jacksonville man who confessed to killing his girlfriend’s 5-month-old daughter and throwing her body in a pond 3 decades ago was executed on Tuesday evening. Andrew Richard Lukehart, 53, was scheduled to receive a 3-drug injection starting at 6 p.m. at Florida State Prison near Starke. He was sentenced to death after being convicted of aggravated child abuse and felony murder in the death of Gabrielle Hanshaw. The baby’s mother told News4JAX she plans to attend the execution.

Florida | The Daily Routine of Death Row Inmates

The breakfast carts rattle through the concrete prison at about 5:30 am and as they approach Death Row the first sounds of morning repeat the last sounds of night - remote controlled locks clanging open and clunking closed, electric gates whirring, heavy metal doors crashing shut, voices wailing, klaxons blaring. A maximum security prison has no soft or delicate sounds. At the end of each corridor of death row cells a guard opens a heavy door of steel bars and a prison trusty pushes a breakfast cart inside. The door closes behind him and when it locks a second door opens and admits the trusty to the wing. He steers his cart along the wing stopping at each cell to pass a tray of powdered eggs and lukewarm grits through a small slot on the bars.

Iraq: German schoolgirl, 17, turned jihadi bride escapes death penalty and is jailed for six years

GERMAN Jihadi bride Linda Wenzel has been jailed for six years in Baghdad for her role as an Islamic enforcer with terror group ISIS. Wenzel, 17, who last year sobbed on TV “I have ruined my life,” could have faced the death penalty. German media reported that a German embassy representative in Iraq was in court yesterday to witness her sentencing. She received five years for joining IS and one year for entering Iraq illegally. Wenzel was found in the rubble of IS stronghold Mosul back in the summer of 2017. Charges were laid against her and three other German women captured with her. Schoolgirl Wenzel fled to Turkey then into Syria last year from her hometown of Pulsnitz in eastern Germany after being groomed online by a Chechen IS fighter who she married. He was killed in the savage fighting for Mosul while she was employed by the terror group enforcing the strict Islamic dress code on women in the city. She burst into tears after her capture and said s...

Death Penalty News

Search This Blog