In the spring of 2025, South Carolina attracted worldwide media attention when it carried out two executions by firing squad at the Broad River Correctional Institution in Columbia. These were the first shootings conducted in the United States since Utah executed Ronnie Lee Gardner in June 2010, and the first in South Carolina’s modern history.
Like many American states, South Carolina had experienced a long hiatus in executions due to the inability to procure lethal injection drugs from pharmaceutical manufacturers. To circumvent the shortage, the state legislature amended the capital statute in 2021, establishing the electric chair as the default method of execution, but offering the condemned the choice of lethal injection or the firing squad. After protracted legal challenges regarding the constitutionality of both electrocution and the rifle squad were rejected by the South Carolina Supreme Court, the Department of Corrections renovated its death chamber to accommodate three volunteer marksmen.
Brad Keith Sigmon
Post-Furman US execution #1613
The Crime
Brad Keith Sigmon was 43 years old when he committed the double murder of David Larke, aged 59, and his 62-year-old wife Gladys at their home in Taylors, Greenville County, on the 27th of April, 2001. Sigmon had recently broken up with the Larkes’ daughter, Rebecca, and harboured bitter resentment towards her parents.
Armed with a baseball bat, Sigmon broke into the residence and battered both victims to death. When Rebecca returned to the home, he ambushed her, forced her into a vehicle at gunpoint, and drove away. She managed to jump from the moving car, though Sigmon shot and wounded her before fleeing across state lines. Following an extensive manhunt, Sigmon was apprehended in Tennessee nine days later. In July 2002, a Greenville County jury found him guilty of two counts of murder and first-degree burglary, and he was sentenced to death.
The Execution
Sigmon’s appeals were finally exhausted in early 2025 after almost twenty-three years on death row. When served with his death warrant, he formally elected execution by firing squad over lethal injection and the electric chair.
On Friday, the 7th of March, 2025, Sigmon was led into the execution chamber at Broad River. The chamber featured a specially fabricated metal chair positioned against a sand-filled, bullet-resistant wall. Sigmon was strapped securely into the chair with chest, waist, wrist, and ankle restraints, and a black hood was placed over his head. A doctor located his heart with a stethoscope and pinned a small, white cloth circular target directly over it.
Behind a wall partition fifteen feet away, three volunteer department employees stood with .308-calibre rifles aimed through three narrow firing ports. All three rifles were loaded with live ammunition.
At 6:05 p.m., the warden read the order and the signal was given. The volley was fired simultaneously. The impact threw Sigmon back against the chair restraints, followed by a slight slump of his upper torso. He gave no obvious outward signs of distress, and an examining physician formally pronounced life extinct at 6:11 p.m. Sigmon was 67 years old, making him the oldest individual executed in South Carolina since the reintroduction of the death penalty.
Mikal Deen Mahdi
Post-Furman US execution #1619
The Crime
Just five weeks later, on Friday, the 11th of April, 2025, South Carolina returned to the firing squad to execute 42-year-old Mikal Deen Mahdi.
In July 2004, Mahdi embarked on an interstate crime spree spanning Virginia and the Carolinas after absconding from a work-release assignment. On the 17th of July, 2004, Mahdi broke into an abandoned farmhouse in Calhoun County, South Carolina, where he encountered 28-year-old Captain Christopher Burrell (often cited in court filings as James Myers/Burrell), an off-duty law enforcement officer. Mahdi shot the officer dead, stole his patrol shotgun and vehicle, and incinerated the victim’s body alongside the car in an attempt to destroy evidence. Mahdi was arrested a short time later in Florida and returned to South Carolina, where he was tried, convicted of capital murder, and sentenced to death.
The Execution
Like Sigmon, Mahdi chose to face the firing squad rather than submit to the three-drug lethal injection or the electric chair.
At 6:00 p.m. on the 11th of April, 2025, Mahdi was strapped into the steel chair at Broad River, hooded, and the heart target was affixed to his dark jumpsuit. Upon the warden’s signal, the three executioners fired their rifles.
Unlike the relatively rapid death recorded for Sigmon, Mahdi’s execution provoked intense controversy. Media witnesses seated behind the viewing glass reported that after the rifle volley struck his chest, Mahdi continued to make heavy, laboured chest movements and audible gasps for nearly four minutes before motion ceased.
Attorneys and abolitionist groups immediately claimed that the squad had missed the exact centre of the heart target, leading to a prolonged death from shock and blood loss rather than instantaneous cardiac rupture. Department officials maintained the rifles struck within the target zone and attributed the observable reactions to post-mortem involuntary muscular spasms. Mahdi was pronounced dead at 6:08 p.m.
The event led several state lawmakers to demand an independent inquiry into the protocol, marking a tumultuous resumption of the rifle method in the American penal system.
For on-the-ground visual footage and local media reports surrounding Mahdi’s proceedings, you can watch South Carolina to execute Mikal Mahdi by firing squad on Friday. This report covers the state’s legal framework and the scheduling of Mahdi’s execution as the second firing squad proceeding carried out that spring.
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