Published 18 May 2021 at 10.39
Abroad. South Carolina's governor has signed a bill that states that poison injection should be the US state's primary method of execution. But if the state can not get hold of the necessary drugs, the death row inmates are faced with a gloomy choice: the electric chair or arquebusing, reports RT.
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Triple killer Jeffrey Motts was released on poison injection in 2011 and is the latest death row inmate to have his sentence served in South Carolina.
Since then, the state has not executed anyone. The only pharmaceutical company that produced the anesthetic used primarily in the executions ceased production in 2009. And the batches stored since then have passed their best-before date.
But on Friday, South Carolina's Republican Gov. Henry signed McMaster a bill that gives death row inmates a choice between the electric chair and arquebusing in cases where the state cannot offer a poison injection.
The use of the electric chair was already legal in South Carolina, but prisoners who refused the execution method were given instead a poison injection. Without available drugs, the executions of these people have instead been postponed indefinitely. The double murderer James Earl Reed became the last prisoner to be executed on South Carolina's electric chair in 2008.
South Carolina is one of eight states that allow executions with the electric chair. Only three other states – Mississippi, Oklahoma and Utah – allow archery. The last prisoner in the United States to be arquebused was the murderer Ronnie Lee Gardner in Utah in 2010. Lee had a hood over his head and a target hanging from his chest when five volunteer shooters shot him dead to death.
Since the United States reintroduced the death penalty in 1977, more than 1,500 prisoners were killed. Of these, 570 executions took place in Texas.