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South Carolina court stays first firing-squad execution in U.S. since 2010 -Breaking

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© Reuters. This illustration photo was taken at Georgetown’s Sussex County Court of Chancery on June 9, 2021. It shows a judge sitting with a saw and a block. REUTERS/Andrew Kelly/File photo

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Jonathan Allen

(Reuters] – South Carolina’s Supreme Court temporarily halted Wednesday the execution of a condemned person scheduled for next Week. It would have been America’s first firing-squad executions in more than a decade.

Richard Moore (57) was convicted of the 1999 murder of a clerk at a grocery store. The jury recommended that he be executed.

Moore requested that South Carolina’s Supreme Court stay his execution. It was originally scheduled for April 29th. Moore had been executing himself earlier in the month. This is due to ongoing legal challenges to both his sentence, and Southern’s execution procedures.

The death row inmates are also suing South Carolina Department of Corrections. They claim that the available execution methods violate South Carolina’s constitution which prohibits cruel and unusual punishments. The constitution of South Carolina explicitly forbids corporal punishment, contrary to what the Eighth Amendment in the U.S. Constitution says.

After telling Moore that execution officers were not able to obtain the lethal injection drugs, the Department of Corrections demanded Moore choose between an electric chair death or a firing squad.

Moore used a firing squad last week. This method has only been used three times since 1950 in the United States.

Utah’s government executed all of these executions. Norman Mailer’s award-winning novel “The Executioner’s Song” (the first execution of Gary Gilmore, a murderer in 1977) was about the subject. According to Washington’s nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center, the other events took place between 1996 and 2010.

Moore declared that “I don’t believe in or admit that firing squads or electrocutions are legal or constitutional.” He gave this information to the Department of Corrections. Moore stated that the Department of Corrections would automatically default to an electric chair if he didn’t make the choice.

Moore requested a temporary halt to permit him to petition U.S. Supreme Court for an injunction to overturn the death sentence. Moore’s lawyers argued that he did not intend to murder because he was unarmed when he entered the shop. Instead, a clerk used his own gun after getting it in a fight.

Moore’s attorney and the Department of Corrections spokesperson did not respond when asked.

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