Who is Brad Sigmon? The South Carolina murderer set for first U.S. firing squad execution in 15 years
“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” Brad Sigmon testified at his trial in July 2002. “I am guilty.”
The South Carolina killer was placed on death row after pleading guilty to the double murder of his ex-girlfriend’s parents, striking them each nine times in the head with a baseball bat.
More than two decades later, the 67-year-old is set to become the first inmate to die by firing squad in the U.S. since the murderer Ronnie Lee Gardner in 2010 and the oldest person ever to be executed in South Carolina.
On March 7, Sigmon is set to be strapped to a chair, a hood placed over his head with a target marking his heart in the death chamber at the Broad River Correctional Institution in Columbia, where he is being held.
Standing about 15 feet away, three volunteers are then expected to open fire at him through a small opening.
In June 2021 Sigmon avoided “Old Sparky,” the 113-year-old electric chair housed at the Central Correctional Institution in Columbia, as the law gave death row inmates the statutory right to choose their method of execution, including firing squad – which was not yet available.
He was again given reprieve that year and for a third time in May 2022 due to the state not having a supply of drugs to administer a lethal injection.
Sigmon chose his manner of execution, the other two choices being lethal injection and electrocution.
The South Carolina Supreme Court ruled last July to allow executions to resume after a 13-year hiatus, with murderer Freddie Eugene Owens put to death by lethal injection two months later in September 2024. The high court also ruled that death by firing squad was a legal form of punishment, despite criticism that it is an inhumane form of justice.
Sigmon didn’t pick the electric chair over fears it would “burn and cook him alive,” his attorney Gerald King wrote in a statement.
He decided against being administered a fatal dose of pentobarbital after three previous recipients of the lethal injection in the state were not declared dead for at least 20 minutes despite it set to work in a fraction of the time, his lawyers added.
Opponents of the death penalty called on Governor Henry McMaster to grant Sigmon clemency soon after his death warrant was issued on February 7. However, no South Carolina governor has previously commuted the sentence of a death row inmate.
Sigmon, whose online prison records show no violent offenses, is “deeply remorseful,” King said.
On Wednesday, his attorneys filed a motion with the state’s Supreme Court requesting a stay of his execution. They said he is being forced to choose a violent death by firing squad because, without more information, he believes the lethal injection would lead to a tortuous death.
