An executive squad has been set up in South Carolina to secure the death penalty, for those convicted who will also have the option of being taken in an electric chair, the governor of the southern US state said Monday.
“Over the weekend, I enacted a law that would allow the state to enforce the death penalty. The families and loved ones of the victims deserve to be closed and justice given as provided by law. “Now we can offer it to them,” Henry McMaster said in a post on his Twitter account.
The Republican governor, supporter of the end of sentences, wants to resume executions after a ten-year hiatus in his state due to a lack of chemicals used in lethal injection executions.
The law, which was signed on Friday, stipulates that the electric chair may be the first choice of a death row inmate instead of the lethal injection, while also approving the establishment of an executive branch, which will be the second choice.
Execution by lethal injection will be given priority again when the necessary chemicals are available again, according to the text.
That’s enough, death row inmates could choose between the electric chair and the lethal injection. The last option was automatic if they refused to choose.
The South Carolina-based Incarcerated Outreach Network, an aid organization for prisoners, denounced the “horrific, shocking, disgusting” decision via Twitter.
According to Frank Nack, the representative of the strong civil and civil rights organization ACLU in the state, South Carolina “found a way to resume executions” in the context of a “racist, arbitrary and error-prone system.”
“South Carolina justice is wrong, but the death penalty is irrevocable,” he said in a statement, adding that people of color represent more than half of all death row inmates, although they do not make up more than 27 percent of the state’s population.
The electric chair, known as “Old Sparky”, has not been used since 2008, with the last fatal injection in 2011, according to the state prison service and local media.
South Carolina is the fourth U.S. state to reinstate the death penalty after executions in Mississippi, Oklahoma and Utah. according to the non-governmental organization Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC).
Only three death row inmates have been brought before an execution squad – all in Utah – after the Supreme Court again allowed in 1976 to impose and enforce the end of sentences in the US, according to the Center.
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