South Carolina recently became one of just four states to allow firing squad as an execution method (the others being Oklahoma, Utah and Mississippi). And now the state is set to carry out the first execution in which a prisoner can choose to be executed by bullet:
The state's Department of Corrections (SCDC) announced Thursday that Richard Bernard Moore, 57, is scheduled to be executed on April 29, which would be the state's first execution in over ten years. Moore was convicted of killing James Mahoney, a convenience store clerk, in Spartenburg and has spent over 20 years on death row, the Associated Press (AP) reported. He will choose between the available execution methods of either death by electric chair or death by firing squad.
I have no desire to ever be executed by the state and I have no intent of ever doing anything that could conceivably put me in that position.
Still...if I had to choose, I think I'd opt for the bullets. It seems liable to be much quicker and less painful than, say, lethal injection or even the electric chair:
There's little empirical or clinical research on the experience of death by execution: In one macabre experiment, conducted in 1938, a physician monitored the heart activity of a man being executed by firing squad and found that his heart essentially stopped functioning less than a minute after the shots were fired. A study conducted in 1993 attempted to measure pain during different forms of execution. It concluded that firing squad was one of the least painful methods — but because the study assumed that the executions went smoothly, it said the same of lethal injection. Dr. Jonathan I. Groner, a professor of surgery at Ohio State University, says that based on his experience as a surgeon and his research on the effects of lethal injection, he believes the firing squad is quicker and causes less suffering than other forms of execution. "There's pain, certainly, but it's transient," he said. "If you're shot in the chest and your heart stops functioning, it's just seconds until you lose consciousness."
"Just seconds until you lose consciousness"?
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