A South Carolina prisoner, scheduled to be the first man to be executed in the state in more than a decade, decided to die by shooting instead of in an electric chair later this month, according to court documents filed Friday.
Richard Moore, 57, is also the first state prisoner to face the method of execution since a law came into force last year that made a default electric shock and allowed inmates to face three inmates with rifles.
Moore has spent more than two decades on death row after being convicted of the 1999 murder of store employee James Mahoney in Spartanburg. If executed on schedule on April 29, he will be the first to be killed in the state since 2011.
The new law was triggered by a decade-long hiatus, which correction officials attribute to the inability to obtain the drugs needed to make lethal injections.
In a written statement, Moore said he did not acknowledge that either method was legal or constitutional, but that he was more strongly opposed to death by electric shock and chose only to be shot because he had to make a choice.
“I believe that this election is forcing me to choose between two unconstitutional methods of execution, and I do not intend to give up any challenges to electric shock or shooting by making elections,” Moore said in a statement.
Moore’s lawyers have asked the state’s Supreme Court to postpone his death, while another court is determining whether any of the available methods is a cruel and unusual punishment. Lawyers say prison officials are not trying hard enough to get the deadly injecting drug, instead forcing inmates to choose between two more barbaric methods.
His lawyers are also asking the US Supreme Court to postpone the execution so that the US Supreme Court can reconsider whether Moore’s death sentence is a disproportionate punishment compared to such crimes. State judges rejected a similar complaint last week.
The State Correctional Agency said last month that it had completed the execution of protocols for the executions of execution squads and completed repairs to the $ 53,600 death chamber in Colombia by installing a metal chair with restraints facing a rectangular wall. hole 15 feet (4.6 meters). In the event of execution, three volunteer prisoners will train their rifles on the convicted prisoner’s heart.
South Carolina is one of eight states still using the electric chair and one of four that allow shootings, according to the Washington-based non-governmental information center on the death penalty.
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