A South Carolina inmate scheduled to die either by a firing squad or in the electric chair later this month is asking the state Supreme Court to halt his execution until judges can determine if either method is cruel and unusual punishment. Richard Bernard Moore is to die April 29 unless a court steps in. He has until next Friday to choose between South Carolina's electric chair, which has been used twice in the past 30 years, or a shooting by three volunteers who are prison workers in rules the state finalized last month, the AP reports. "The electric chair and the firing squad are antiquated, barbaric methods of execution that virtually all American jurisdictions have left behind," Moore's lawyer Lindsey Vann wrote in a court filing Friday.
State law also allows lethal injection, but South Carolina has not been able to obtain the drugs to kill an inmate in the past several years, prompting the General Assembly in 2021 to pass a law including the firing squad so executions could being again. The state has not put an inmate to death in nearly 11 years. Moore's lawyers said judges need to review the new firing squad rules to see if they violate a ban on cruel and unusual punishment and also examine the electric chair with the way executions have changed in the past several decades. A similar lawsuit by two other inmates is pending.
Vann also is asking the state Supreme Court to delay the execution so the US Supreme Court can review whether Moore's death sentence was a disproportionate punishment. Moore, 57, has spent more than two decades on death row after he was convicted in 2001 of killing convenience store clerk James Mahoney in Spartanburg. Moore's supporters said his crime did not rise to the level of a death penalty offense because he did not bring a gun into the store and did not intend to kill anyone until the store clerk pulled a gun on him. Moore planned to rob the store for money to support his cocaine habit, and Mahoney pulled a gun that Moore wrestled away, investigators said. Mahoney pulled a second gun, and the men fired at each other.
(More
execution stories.)
,
uBlock 
,
and
Ghostery 
)
