South Carolina is due to execute a man by firing squad on Friday, marking the third time the state will use gunfire to kill a person on death row despite growing backlash to the method.
Stephen Bryant, 44, was sentenced to death for the October 2004 killing of Willard “TJ” Tietjen and pleaded guilty to two other murders. Bryant’s lawyers argued that the sentencing judge was unable to consider his brain damage from his mother’s alcohol and drug use during pregnancy, but South Carolina’s supreme court declined to halt the execution on Monday.
South Carolina has revived executions over the last year, killing six people in rapid succession after a 13-year pause in capital punishment. In March, the state conducted its first firing squad execution, a method human rights advocates have called “barbaric” and had not been used anywhere in the US in 15 years.
Bryant’s lawyers claimed he did not receive a full brain scan before his 2008 trial, which could have identified damage, the AP reported. His attorneys have said the brain damage was compounded by “appalling physical and sexual abuse committed by several family members” during childhood, arguing his counsel at sentencing “ignored myriad red flags of his brain damage”.
The South Carolina attorney general’s office contended Bryant’s brain damage claims were irrelevant, saying Bryant was “methodical, cunning, and took pleasure” in his crimes, including the “gratuitous infliction of horror on Mr Tietjen’s family”.
“The character of the defendant and the circumstances of the crimes weigh in favor of the harshest punishment,” the state’s lawyers wrote.
Investigators said Bryant had burned Tietjen’s eyes with cigarettes and painted taunting messages with his blood.
South Carolina death row defendants are now directed to select how they will be killed – electric chair, lethal injection or gunfire. While lethal injection is the most common method in the US states that have continued executions, there have been growing concerns that the use of pentobarbital, a sedative, can cause a prolonged and excruciating death.
In a recent pentobarbital execution in Tennessee, records showed the man’s lungs became swollen with fluid, a condition that death row lawyers say causes a feeling of suffocation and drowning.
Brad Sigmon, the first man to be killed by firing squad in South Carolina this year, chose gunfire because he was concerned by reports that the three men executed before him, whom he knew well, had experienced painful deaths that took more than 20 minutes, his attorneys said at the time. He preferred gunfire to being “burned … alive” by electrocution.
Lawyers for Mikal Mahdi, the second man shot to death by South Carolina officials, said he chose the “lesser of three evils”. Mahdi’s lawyers said his autopsy showed the execution was botched, with the shooters allegedly missing the target area on his heart, causing a prolonged death. State corrections’ officials disputed the lawyers’ claims, saying the autopsy showed the shooters struck his heart before hitting other organs.
Defendants facing firing squads in the state are generally strapped to a chair and have a hood over their head before three shooters fire.
Bryant’s lawyers declined to comment. The attorney general’s office did not respond to inquiries. Chrysti Shain, South Carolina corrections spokesperson, referred to her past statements that the firing squad did not miss Mahdi’s heart. She said accounts of the state’s recent lethal injection executions suggested the men “stopped breathing after a short time period”.
The Rev Hillary Taylor, executive director of South Carolinians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, said people on death row face an “impossible choice”: “Do you choose being poisoned to death in a way that is akin to waterboarding, do you get cooked to death by electrocution, or do you get your heart blown out of your chest by a firing squad?”
More gun violence was not the solution to crimes, Taylor argued. She noted court records showing Bryant had sought mental health treatment before his killings, but could not afford a $75 fee for care: “We’re never going to solve the problem of violence in South Carolina if we are not willing to prevent it from happening in the first place.”
