DPIC Commemorates Juneteenth: Our Report, Enduring Injustice, Details the Persistence of Racial Discrimination in the U.S. Death Penalty

Today, the DPIC office is closed in observance of Juneteenth, which celebrates the emancipation of enslaved people in the United States. As we commemorate this holiday, we remember the historical relationship between slavery, lynching, Jim Crow segregation, and the death penalty and their use as instruments of social control to maintain racial hierarchy. Our September 2020 report, Enduring Injustice, delves into the historical use of capital punishment, providing context for the racial disparities that persist in the modern death penalty system. The story below accompanied the release of that report. DPIC's overview page on Race and the Death Penalty also provides valuable resources, including links to studies, data, and news on the issue.

South Carolina Supreme Court Halts Executions of Brad Sigmon and Freddie Owens

The South Carolina Supreme Court has vacated death warrants for two death-row prisoners scheduled to be executed this month, staying their executions until the South Carolina Department of Corrections (SCDOC) complies with a newly enacted state law requiring that it offer condemned prisoners the option of being executed by firing squad.

In separate orders issued on June 16, 2021 in the cases of Brad Sigmon, who faced a June 18 execution, and Freddie Owens, who was scheduled to be executed June 25, 2021, the court ruled that attempting to execute the men by electrocution without offering them the alternative of lethal injection or firing squad violated the “statutory right of inmates to elect the manner of their execution.” Both orders also directed the court’s clerk “not to issue another execution notice until the State notifies the Court that the Department of Corrections, in addition to maintaining the availability of electrocution, has developed and implemented appropriate protocols and policies to carry out executions by firing squad.”

The stays marked the second time this year the court had halted Sigmon’s and Owens’s executions because of the state’s inability to lawfully carry them out. On February 4, the court vacated an execution notice scheduling Sigmon’s execution for February 12, finding that “the execution is currently impossible” because South Carolina had no lethal injection drugs on hand. It then directed the clerk “not to issue another execution notice in this case until the State notifies this Court that the Department of Corrections has the ability to carry out the execution by lethal injection, that the petitioner has made an election to be electrocuted, or that there has been some change in the law which will allow the execution to take place.” On May 4, the court stayed Owens’s scheduled May 14 execution on similar grounds.

The new law enacted in May in response to the SCDOC’s inability to obtain execution drugs, changed South Carolina’s default method of execution from lethal injection to the electric chair and directed death-row prisoners to choose electrocution, firing squad, or lethal drugs, if available, as the means of their death. If the prisoner did not make a selection, the law mandated execution by electric chair.

If the executions had been permitted to proceed, they would have been the first in South Carolina in more than a decade and the state’s first forced execution by electrocution in more than twenty years.

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