A bill advancing through the North Carolina General Assembly seeks to restart capital punishment in the state, where legal challenges to the state’s lethal injection method have paused the death penalty for 19 years.
A House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday gave preliminary approval to House Bill 270, which would allow criminals sentenced to death in North Carolina to choose lethal injection, electrocution, or firing squad for their execution.
Lethal injection has been North Carolina’s primary method for executions since 1998, when the state pivoted away from lethal gas. The state hasn’t carried out a death penalty sentence since 2006, when legal challenges put executions on hold. A federal judge ruled that a doctor must monitor the condemned for signs of pain, to make sure no unconstitutional pain occurs. However, the state’s medical board at the time threatened to punish any doctor who takes part in an execution because it conflicts with the Hippocratic oath to “do no harm,” the Associated Press reported.
State Rep. David Willis, a Republican from Union County who sponsored the bill, said he hopes the legislation will help the state resume executions in part by moving to methods that don’t require doctors.
“We're here today to support those families who have long been awaiting justice and closure to the loss of loved ones by the folks that have been put on death row,” Willis said.
House Bill 270, sponsored by nine House Republicans, would require inmates to select their preferred method of execution in writing 14 days before it’s scheduled to take place. If the inmate makes no choice, the penalty would be carried out by electrocution.
The state hasn’t used the electric chair for an execution since 1938. Critics of the bill said the new execution options are inhumane.
“Electrocutions are gruesome,” said Jennifer Copeland, executive director of the North Carolina Council of Churches, a group that advocates for social justice.
“Prisoners catch fire cooked from the inside, there is a smell of burning human flesh,” Copeland said.
The proposal comes less than two months after South Carolina executed a man by firing squad, marking the first time it had been done in the U.S. in 15 years, according to the AP. The deceased South Carolina man, Brad Sigmon, was sentenced to death after he was convicted of killing his ex-girlfriend's parents with a baseball bat in 2001.
Sigmon was given a choice for his execution, the AP reported. His lawyers said he chose the firing squad because the electric chair would “cook him alive,” and he feared that a lethal injection would send a rush of fluid and blood into his lungs and drown him, according to the AP.
Earlier this month, South Carolina executed another man by firing squad: Mikal Mahdi, 42, who was convicted of killing an off-duty police officer in 2004, the AP reported.
Killing someone by lethal injection is considered to be a cruel punishment by some. The Death Penalty Information Center, a nonprofit organization that researches the death penalty but doesn’t take a position on the practice, reviewed executions carried out between 1890 and 2010. The group found that more than 7% of lethal injection executions were botched, the highest rate of the executions they tracked.
North Carolina Rep. Laura Budd, D-Mecklenburg, said Tuesday that she worries about resuming executions at a time when the state is also considering eliminating funding for North Carolina’s Innocence Inquiry Commission, a small state agency that investigates prison inmates’ claims that they were wrongfully convicted.
The commission has exonerated more than a dozen people wrongfully convicted of murder, rape and other serious crimes since its creation in 2006. A state budget proposed by Senate Republicans would cut all funding for the agency. The commission has 13 full-time employees, and a total annual budget of $1.6 million — approximately 0.005% of the state’s overall budget.
Senate Republicans said the commission hasn’t handled enough cases to be worth the investment in a year when they’re trying to cut costs. Budd, the House Democrat, told committee members that the state shouldn’t take risks with peoples’ lives.
“Once you take a person's life, it's gone,” Budd said.
