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South Carolina Carries Out 'Horrifying and Violent' Firing Squad Execution of Brad Sigmon
"By executing Brad Sigmon, South Carolina has also executed the possibility of redemption," said one critic. "Our state is declaring that no matter what you do to make up for your wrongdoing, we reserve the right to kill you."
Mar 08, 2025
South Carolina executed Brad Keith Sigmon by firing squad on Friday evening, drawing international attention to a method that hasn't been used for 15 years in the United States and prompting renewed calls to abolish capital punishment.
Sigmon, 67—who was convicted of beating his ex-girlfriend's parents, David and Gladys Larke, to death with a baseball bat in 2001—was shot by a firing squad consisting of three volunteers at the Broad River Correctional Institution in Columbia, the state capital, at 6:05 p.m. local time Friday, according to a statement from the South Carolina Department of Corrections. He was pronounced dead by a physician three minutes later.
Gerald "Bo" King, an attorney representing Sigmon, read his client's final statement shortly before his execution.
"I want my closing statement to be one of love and a calling to my fellow Christians to help us end the death penalty," Sigmon wrote. "An eye for an eye was used as justification to the jury for seeking the death penalty."
"At that time, I was too ignorant to know how wrong that was," he added. "Why? Because we no longer live under the Old Testament law but now live under the New Testament. Nowhere does God in the New Testament give man the authority to kill another man."
A hood was then placed over Sigmon's head and a bullseye over his heart. The three volunteers then fired their rifles from an opening in a wall 15 feet (4.5 meters) away.
"There was no warning or countdown," wrote witness and journalist Jeffrey Collins. "The abrupt crack of the rifles startled me. And the white target with the red bullseye that had been on his chest, standing out against his black prison jumpsuit, disappeared instantly as Sigmon's whole body flinched... A jagged red spot about the size of a small fist appeared where Sigmon was shot."
"I've now watched through glass and bars as 11 men were put to death at a South Carolina prison," Collins noted. "None of the previous 10 prepared me for watching the firing squad death of Brad Sigmon on Friday night."
King, who also witnessed Sigmon's killing, described the execution as "horrifying and violent."
"He chose the firing squad knowing that three bullets would shatter his bones and destroy his heart," said King. "But that was the only choice he had, after the state's three executions by lethal injection inflicted prolonged and potentially torturous deaths on men he loved like brothers."
"He chose the firing squad knowing that three bullets would shatter his bones and destroy his heart."
A desire to resume executions during a 10-year pause due to a shortage of lethal injection drugs prompted Republican state lawmakers to pass and GOP South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster in 2021 to sign legislation forcing the state's death row inmates to choose between the electric chair, firing squad, or lethal injection (if available) as their method of execution.
King said state officials failed to provide information about lethal injection drugs.
"Brad only wanted assurances that these drugs were not expired, or diluted, or spoiled—what any of us would want to know about the medication we take, or the food we eat, much less the means of our death," the attorney explained.
Sigmon's legal team had unsuccessfully argued that brain damage and mental illness should have spared him from execution.
Rev. Hillary Taylor, executive director of the advocacy group South Carolinians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty (SCADP), said in a
statement Friday that "by executing Brad Sigmon, South Carolina has also executed the possibility of redemption."
"As Brad's spiritual advisor, I can personally attest to the fact that he is a different man today than the person he was more than 20 years ago, when he harmed the Larke family," she continued. "Our state is declaring that no matter what you do to make up for your wrongdoing, we reserve the right to kill you."
"But the question is not whether Brad deserved to die: The question is whether we deserved to kill," Taylor asserted. "In John 8, Jesus had very pointed instructions about which people can kill other people: 'Only those without sin can cast the first stone."
"The last time I checked, no person on this Earth fits that description, not even Gov. Henry McMaster, whose hardened heart remains the reason why executions continue in the first place," she added.
South Carolina has been executing condemned inmates at a rate described by ACLU of South Carolina communications director Paul Bowers as an "assembly line." The state has put four people to death since last September: Freddie Eugene Owens, killed by lethal injection last September 20; Richard Bernard Moore, killed by lethal injection (after changing his choice from firing squad) last November 1; Marion Bowman Jr., killed by lethal injection on January 31; and Sigmon.
State records show 28 inmates on South Carolina's death row.
Across the United States, there are five more executions scheduled this month, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
This is the first of six executions scheduled in six states this month. From the Death Penalty Information Center, one is scheduled for next week and then a horrifying four the week after that. This appears, however, to be more confluence than some big change. deathpenaltyinfo.org/executions/u...
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— Chris Geidner (@chrisgeidner.bsky.social) March 7, 2025 at 3:52 PM
Addressing the issue of capital punishment in South Carolina, SCADP's Taylor said Friday that "despite national and international media news coverage, most South Carolinians will go to bed tonight unaware that we have executed another person—let alone with a firing squad."
"That's how little this issue impacts our citizens," she continued. "South Carolina should be known by other states and countries for its radical care of its citizens. Instead, we are known for our state-sponsored violence."
"If executions made us safer, we would be the 9th-safest state in the country," Taylor argued. "But they don't, and we aren't. It is not the state leaders who will reap the consequences of the death penalty: it is the everyday South Carolina citizens themselves. As long as we have the death penalty, we will fail to address the true causes of violence, including poverty, abuse, and neglect."
South Carolina carries out execution by firing squad, first in USA since 2010. A reminder that these 6 MAGA men also intro'd a bill to codify abortion as murder—enabling the horrific scenario that a woman who gets an abortion could be executed by firing squad. www.qasimrashid.com/p/s-carolina...
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— Qasim Rashid, Esq. (@qasimrashid.com) March 8, 2025 at 5:38 AM
Yet instead of curtailing executions, many South Carolina Republicans want to expand the category of crimes that qualify for capital punishment. In 2023, more than 20 Republican state lawmakers backed a bill to make people who obtain abortion care eligible for execution.
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Faith Leaders Blast GOP's Attacks on Poor and Tax Cuts for the Rich
"We are releasing this powerful report to expose for the American people how immoral, dangerous, and insane the administration's proposed economic decisions are," said Bishop William Barber.
Mar 05, 2025
Leaders from various faiths came together in Washington, D.C. on Christians' Ash Wednesday to share an open letter and report calling out efforts by U.S. President Donald Trump's administration and Republicans in Congress to rip resources away from the working class to fund tax giveaways for the ultrarich.
"Budgets are moral documents," said Bishop William J. Barber II, president and senior lecturer of Repairers of the Breach, in a statement. "We are releasing this powerful report to expose for the American people how immoral, dangerous, and insane the administration's proposed economic decisions are and how they are going to hurt people."
"At this critical moment in our nation's history, we need a government that promotes unity and love towards all members of the human family, not division and hatred," added Barber, whose group released the report in partnership with the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) and the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS).
"The Trump-GOP agenda would tilt the playing field even further away from poor and low-income people in favor of the wealthy and big corporations."
The report—titled The High Moral Stakes of the Policy Battles Raging in Washington—explains that "social safety net and housing programs are under attack from two fronts," pointing to both Republican lawmakers' pursuit of cuts and Elon Musk, the unelected leader of Trump's so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
The document details attacks on Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), commonly called food stamps. It also warns that other "vital" initiatives such as the early childhood education program Head Start and federal rental assistance "could be on the chopping block."
EPI president Heidi Shierholz said that "as this report shows, these cuts will be profoundly destructive to incomes and economic security for this country's most vulnerable households—and they are being done for the sole purpose of providing tax cuts that will go overwhelmingly to the wealthiest households."
"This is an upside-down agenda that literally takes from struggling families to line the pockets of billionaires," she stressed. "We stand against this—and we stand for moral economic policies that lift up the most vulnerable, strengthen our communities, and ensure prosperity is shared by all."
Specifically, the GOP aims to extend expiring provisions of the 2017 Trump-GOP tax law that, as the report notes, "delivered huge windfalls to the rich and large corporations and contributed to the exploding wealth and power of our country's billionaire class."
"The Trump-GOP agenda puts recent improvements in the U.S. unemployment rate, low-income workers' real wages, and labor protections at risk. They have already rolled back some gains and indicated opposition to raising the federal minimum wage," the report continues, highlighting that while some states have higher hourly rates, the nationwide minimum wage has been $7.25 since 2009.
The publication also blasts Trump's anti-immigrant policies, emphasizing that "immigrants are a vital part of our communities and economy," and the president's mass deportations "would devastate undocumented and authorized immigrants and citizens alike."
The document concludes with a section on Trump's "alarming moves toward more widespread use of the U.S. war machine both around the world, and within the United States," citing his declaration of a national emergency at the Mexican border, attempt to dismantle the United States Agency for International Development, and proposed takeovers of the Gaza Strip, Greenland, and the Panama Canal.
"This report's data make clear that the Trump-GOP agenda would tilt the playing field even further away from poor and low-income people in favor of the wealthy and big corporations," said IPS executive director Tope Folarin. "We will see more families go hungry, lose healthcare, and struggle to pay rent while Republicans give huge tax windfalls and unprecedented political power to the wealthiest Americans and throw more tax dollars into the machines of war and mass deportation."
Former IPS director John Cavanagh, who is now a senior adviser, joined faith leaders outside the U.S. Supreme Court in D.C. for a gathering to discuss the new report and the letter, which Barber read to the crowd and which can be signed on his group's website.
"We write to issue this call for repentance and truth-telling because our most basic moral commitments have been betrayed by our political leaders," the letter declares. "We have struggled to realize a republic committed to equality and freedom for all of us."
"We write today to confess that we have become subject to the tyranny of technology," it continues. "Awed by the possibilities of progress and the promise of limitless growth, our political leaders have allowed corporate power to go unchecked for decades. Our courts have ruled that corporations should be treated like people while everyday people have been increasingly treated like things. In the richest nation in the history of the world, poverty has become epidemic as the fourth leading cause of death."
"As people of faith, we stand together in the public square to say, 'We repent.' We are not afraid of the false god of efficiency, and we will not bow to any tyranny that claims control of our common life," the letter states. "We invite our colleagues to assemble on the town square, at city hall, or on the state house lawn in communities across this land and join this call. As we have in Washington today, we invite communities to study the report on the true state of our nation."
The livestreamed event was followed by a march to the U.S. Capitol to deliver the documents to congressional leadership.
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Do You Want to Work for Justice? Go to Eviction Court
The closer we get to the millions of people who are facing evictions or already unhoused, the more likely we are to be motivated to do something about it.
Mar 04, 2025
Before the Super Bowl brought global attention and hundreds of thousands of visitors to New Orleans in February, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry cleared out over 100 unhoused people from downtown, busing them to an unheated warehouse miles away.
In our community of Indianapolis, advocates fear similar clear outs will happen when a planned city shelter outside the downtown area is finished.
Which makes me think of Stanley Milgram and Bryan Stevenson.
“On that fifth day, the weather was very cold and rainy. All I could think about was the young dad and his son without a home, with a job disrupted, and the young boy missing school.”
Milgram was the Yale University psychologist who conducted the famous experiments in the 1960s that showed a disturbing willingness of study participants to follow orders to administer what they thought were powerful electric shocks to other study participants.
The unsettling results remain widely known. But one component of Milgram’s experiments is less often discussed: The study participants were far less likely to administer the shocks if they could hear or see the victims of their actions.
Milgram used the word “proximity” to describe that variable. Which is the same term that Bryan Stevenson uses when he describes how we can change the world.
Stevenson is the attorney behind the book Just Mercy and the film of the same name, and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative. Stevenson traces his lifelong devotion to ending mass incarceration and promoting racial justice back to an event when he was still a law student. While interning for a human rights organization, Stevenson was assigned to go to a maximum-security prison in Georgia and deliver some procedural case news to a man on death row.
But the planned brief meeting turned into a three-hour deep, wide-ranging conversation. At the end of his time with Stevenson, the prisoner sang the hymn, “I’m Pressing on the Upward Way.”
Which launched Stevenson on his lifelong trajectory devoted to seeking justice. “It’s because I got close enough to a condemned man to hear his song,” he says. “When you get proximate, you hear the songs. And those melodies in those songs will empower you, they will inspire you, and they will teach you what doing justice and loving mercy is all about.”
What Gov. Jeff Landry, Stanley Milgram, and Bryan Stevenson can all tell us is this: The closer we get to the millions of people who are facing evictions or already unhoused, the more likely we are to be motivated to do something about it.
Carolyn Kingen can tell us that, too.
A retired critical care cardiac nurse, Kingen in 2020 joined some of her fellow members of the Meridian Street United Methodist Church in Indianapolis for a book study group that chose to read Matthew Desmond’s Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City. After reading and talking about the horrors of our nation’s eviction crisis, where 3.6 million households face forced removal from their homes each year, the group decided to see for themselves.
On one of Kingen’s first visits to eviction court, she heard a father of a seven-year-old boy explain to the judge that he had fallen behind on rent because he had not received expected overtime pay from his job. But, the father said, the overtime boost would be coming through in his next paycheck, which was arriving in a week. He could catch up on rent then, and pay late fees too.
The judge, unmoved, ordered the family to be evicted within five days. “The entire case lasted three or four minutes,” Kingen recalls. “In those few minutes, the decision was made that an employed father and mother had to pack their belongings and get out.”
“On that fifth day, the weather was very cold and rainy. All I could think about was the young dad and his son without a home, with a job disrupted, and the young boy missing school.”
“I Could Be That Tenant”
Experiences like this spurred Kingen and the book group to create a Housing Justice Task Force in their church, and then join with other congregations of different faiths to create the Indiana Eviction Justice Network. I teach a law school clinic where my students and I represent people facing eviction in the same area. I can attest that the presence of court watchers changes the tenor of the proceedings, ramping up the respect paid to tenants facing the loss of their homes.
And the eviction court watchers go beyond the doors of the courtrooms. They take the proximity-provided lessons and use them to advocate with elected officials and the judges themselves. Rabbi Aaron Spiegel, who as director of the Greater Indianapolis Multifaith Alliance coordinates the court-watching program, connects the volunteers with lawmakers to push for housing reforms like mediation before eviction orders, sealings of past eviction records, living wages, and more and better affordable housing.
“Court watchers often know more about systemic housing issues than the elected officials they are talking to,” Spiegel says. Earlier this year, court watchers mobilized to lobby Indiana legislators in opposition to a bill that would have criminalized sleeping in public spaces. Last month, the legislation was withdrawn by its sponsor.
Court proceedings are open to the public, and several other communities across the country, in places like Greensboro, North Carolina; Houston, and Chicago, have court-watching programs, often connected to justice advocacy.
Kingen and many of the other court watchers are motivated by their faith or moral principles. “We are called to care for the poor, the orphans, widows—and in today’s society, we would include any group that is shunned or rejected,” she says. “I try to see Christ in the faces of every person I meet.”
Rabbi Spiegel says this same call to action crosses faith and moral traditions. “All religious traditions teach that we must take care of the ‘least among us’ and as such, housing is a human right,” he says.
The proximity Carolyn Kingen experiences in court allows her to see in those facing eviction not just the divine but herself as well. Kingen recalls a time when she could not pay her rent, but was fortunate enough to have a family member step up to help. “Each time I court watch, I try to remind myself that I could be that tenant appearing before the judge,” she says.
Placing herself in the shoes of those facing homelessness is far easier to do when she can be in the same room and hear their stories, Kingen says. Court proceedings are open to the public, and several other communities across the country, in places like Greensboro, North Carolina; Houston, and Chicago, have court-watching programs, often connected to justice advocacy.
Check and see if there is a program in your community. And if there isn’t, maybe consider helping start one yourself.
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