SC lawmaker vows to introduce bill that could bring lethal injection back for executions

The South Carolina lawmaker who sponsored a new law that introduced the firing squad and brought back the electric chair said that next legislative session, he will introduce a bill that could kick-start the state’s ability to offer lethal injection as a method of execution.

In an op-ed published Wednesday in The State, Sen. Greg Hembree, R-Horry, said he would file a shield law bill, which would block the name of drug companies that choose to sell lethal injection drugs to the state from the public record.

Hembree could not be reached for comment Thursday morning.

Shield laws have been successful in other states seeking the necessary drugs to carry out lethal injections. While states that have to publicly disclose what companies are selling them the drugs, like South Carolina, have been blocked from purchasing them, states with shield laws, like Texas, have successfully been procuring the drugs for years.

For the last decade, drug companies have sought to clamp down on how their products are being used. They’ve refused to sell the necessary drugs to carry out a lethal injection to states that did not protect their names from being released to the public.

As South Carolina’s supply of lethal injection drugs expired, some state lawmakers pushed to pass a shield law, which would restart the state’s ability to carry out an execution. Because the default method of execution was the lethal injection at the time, the state could not carry out an execution unless an inmate specifically chose to die in the electric chair.

Two bills, introduced in 2015 and 2016, failed to gain any traction.

In his op-ed, Hembree said this was, in part, due to lobbying by Justice360, a Columbia group that is providing legal counsel to three death row inmates who have received stays of execution. Hembree’s claims have been echoed in court in recent weeks by lawyers for the S.C. Department of Corrections and S.C. Gov. Henry McMaster, who fought claims that the state did not try hard enough to procure lethal injection drugs so it could be offered as a method of execution to the inmates, who are facing their deaths.

“After their testimony, the bill that would have created a shield law never got out of committee,” Hembree wrote. “We are here today because Justice 360 opposed a shield law.”

Without a shield law in place, the state sought other ways to resume carrying out death sentences.

This year, lawmakers changed the state’s execution law, making the electric chair the default method of execution. Under the new law, inmates can also choose to die by lethal injection or firing squad if those methods are available.

“Opposing the creation of a shield law paved the way for the recent death penalty law to pass, creating a firing squad and making the electric chair the state’s default method of execution,” Hembree wrote in his op-ed.

With only the electric chair available, the state pushed forward with plans to execute two of the three inmates who had received stays because Corrections was unable to carry out their execution. Death row inmates Brad Sigmon and Freddie Owens were scheduled to die before the end of June.

Their executions were ultimately postponed by the state Supreme Court just days before Sigmon’s was scheduled. The court ruled that no execution could be carried out under the new law until the inmate could be provided multiple methods of death to choose from.

The Department of Corrections is currently developing procedures to carry out an execution by firing squad. However, if lawmakers were to pass a shield law before those procedures were in place and Corrections were able to purchase the drugs, executions could resume with the option of lethal injection on the table.