(NewsNation) — Brad Sigmon, a South Carolina inmate executed by the firing squad, was allowed to meet with his spiritual adviser one last time Friday morning.
Rev. Hilary Taylor, executive director of South Carolinians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, spoke with Sigmon for two hours before his execution.
“When I was with Brad this morning from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m., Brad and I and another spiritual adviser talked about supporting family and friends,” Taylor said on NewsNation’s “Banfield.”
“Whereas for the people that he loved, the people that he had formed community with before his incarceration and also during his incarceration.”
Sigmon chose to die by firing squad – the first inmate in the U.S. in 15 years to be executed by this method – because he was afraid of lethal injection.
Lethal injections can sometimes go wrong. In the 1985 execution of Texas inmate Stephen Peter Morin, it took execution technicians nearly 45 minutes to find a suitable vein, for example.
“Lethal injection had the highest rate of botched executions,” according to the Death Penalty Information Center, a national nonprofit that analyzes data on capital punishment.
Execution methods in the U.S. include hanging, electrocution, lethal gas, lethal injection and firing squad.
“The thing that Brad was forced to do was to make an impossible decision between being injected with poison by people who are not medical doctors, being cooked alive by electric chair or having his chest blown out of, or having his heart blown out of his chest by the firing squad,” Taylor said.
Sigmon, 67, was convicted of killing his ex-girlfriend’s parents in 2001.
At the time of the murder, Sigmon was attempting to kidnap his ex-girlfriend and confessed that he was likely going to kill her and then himself. He forced her into his car when she arrived at her parents’ home, but she jumped out of it as Sigmon drove away and escaped.
Gov. Henry McMaster declined to grant clemency. He was pronounced dead at 6:08 p.m. Friday.
“I want my closing statement to be one of love and a calling to my fellow Christians to end the death penalty,” Sigmon said in his final statement read to witnesses, according to the South Carolina Department of Corrections.
Gerald “Bo” King, chief of the Capital Habeas Unit for the Fourth Circuit, issued the following statement on behalf of Sigmon’s legal team: “Knowing that he was going to die, Brad Sigmon used his final statement to call on his fellow people of faith to end the death penalty and spare the lives of the 28 men still locked up on South Carolina’s death row.”
Six inmate executions are planned over the next three weeks in Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana and Florida using a variety of methods.
Sigmon was the first South Carolina inmate to die by firing squad.
“He expressed remorse every day of his incarceration at the violence that he caused and sought to be a different person since his incarceration,” Taylor said.
“Tried to be as supportive and loving as kind as possible to everyone in his midst, whether that was his neighbors on death row, whether that was corrections officers, whether that was pen pals and family members that he was supporting from afar, emotionally and spiritually.”
NewsNation’s Alex Caprariello contributed to this report.
