It’s been more than a decade since Randy Gardner’s brother was the last U.S. inmate executed by firing squad, years the Utah man says have been filled with nightmares about what he describes as his brother’s “gruesome” death. Now, Gardner is among advocates spending time in South Carolina, speaking out about why he feels the method shouldn’t be used here, reported The Associated Press.
Gardner didn’t witness the 2010 execution of his brother,
Ronnie Lee Gardner, condemned to die for shooting a man to death during a
failed courthouse escape attempt. But Gardner said that Ronnie had chosen to
die by firing squad — restrained in a chair as five gunmen carried out the
sentence, a hood covering his face — in part because of how he had taken
another person’s life. You can read about Gardner's conviction and execution in my book The Executioner's Toll, 2010.
“He knew how gruesome the firing squad would be,” Randy
Gardner told The Associated Press on Friday. “But he thought, well, he killed
someone with a gun, and he thought he deserved the same treatment.”
Gardner has been part of recent conversations arranged by
Death Penalty Action, a national anti-death penalty group that helps local ones
organize against capital punishment. A small gathering was planned for Columbia
on Friday, with a larger rally scheduled for Saturday in Greenville.
Also included in the events are speakers like the Rev.
Sharon Risher, whose mother was among the nine Bible study participants slain
in a 2015 racist attack at a Black Charleston church. Risher planned to discuss
the wounds she feels are reopened each time the man sentenced to die in that
case resurfaces, such as with his
recent appeal.
“For me and many people like me, appeals are the worst
torture imaginable,” Risher, who wants Dylann
Roof’s death sentence overturned, said in a release. “Every time this
case is in the news ... I am brought right back to that terrible day and the
searing pain of the weeks, months and years that have followed.”
The tour comes as a newly scheduled execution looms under
South Carolina’s revamped capital punishment law — which now includes a firing
squad option, making the state one of four in the nation to do so.
This month, South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster signed
into law a bill forcing condemned inmates to choose between the
electric chair or firing squad, in hopes the state can resume executions after
an involuntary 10-year pause due to lack of lethal injection drugs. The law
officially retains injection as the primary method but requires prison
officials to use the electric chair or firing squad if the state doesn’t have
the drugs.
Two inmates who’ve exhausted their appeals immediately sued,
saying they can’t be electrocuted or shot since they were sentenced under a
prior law making lethal injection the default method.
One of those inmates was Brad Sigmon, convicted in 2002 for
a double murder. On Thursday, the South Carolina Supreme Court set
June 18 as Sigmon’s execution date, which his attorneys are seeking to
block while the lawsuit proceeds.
There are 37 men on South Carolina’s death row. The state’s
last execution took place in 2011, and its batch of lethal injection drugs
expired two years later.
“It’s actually a bit of surprise to me that it has taken
states this long,” Abe Bonowitz, Death Penalty Action’s executive director,
told the AP, of jurisdictions’ addition of execution methods, due to drug
unavailability. “Our point is that, for 10 years, we’ve not had an execution,
and it hasn’t made a difference about whether murderers are caught or held
accountable, so what’s the point?”
Even though he didn’t see his brother’s execution, Randy Gardner
said he still suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder due to the way that
Ronnie died, haunted for years by nightmares related to firing squads.
“I think it is cruel and unusual punishment, to someone like
Ronnie, but also to his family and the people who loved him,” Gardner said.
“You’re becoming no better than the killer. And an eye for an eye makes the
whole world go blind.”
During South Carolina’s lengthy debate, Democratic state
Sen. Dick Harpootlian — a prosecutor-turned-criminal defense lawyer —
introduced the firing squad option, arguing it presented “the least painful”
execution method available.
“The death penalty is going to stay the law here for a
while,” Harpootlian said. “If we’re going to have it, it ought to be humane.”
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