South Carolina’s push to bring back the firing squad for executions says a lot about the state of capital punishment today. zakcheneyrice writes
Two methods of execution South Carolina offers to the condemned: electric chair or firing squad . Photo: Uncredited/AP/Shutterstock Dick Harpootlian slipped out of the South Carolina General Assembly on April 20 to tell me why people on death row should be allowed to die by firing squad. “My experience in this area probably exceeds most people’s,” he said, noting the death penalty cases he had handled during his time as a prosecutor, on and off, between 1975 and 1995.
The state senator “abhors” the death penalty except for “extreme cases,” he said to me, and he still sees Gaskins as a “poster child” for why capital punishment has its place. “The only time we can relax our vigilance on Pee Wee is when he is in Hell,” Harpootlian quipped less than a week before the execution. But, he elaborated to me, “if it should be done in some instances, I felt that being shot was a much quicker, much less cruel way to do it.
“There’s no good way to kill somebody,” he explained to me, but at least the firing squad was usually “instantaneous.” It is an option in Utah, a fact Harpootlian cited as evidence of its preferability, even as Moore, the condemned man, maintains that South Carolina “is forcing me to choose between two unconstitutional methods of execution.”
There are ways in which South Carolina’s situation is emblematic of the souring promise of 2020, when there appeared to be broadening agreement in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder that this country’s criminal-justice system was too punitive. Support grew across the U.S. for a range of reforms, and police favorability fell to dramatic lows. Congress was poised to take positive, if modest, bipartisan action. But it did not take long for people to change their minds.
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