Columbia, South Carolina — A man is scheduled to be executed in South Carolina on Friday by A firing squadHe is the third person to die in this way in the state this year.
Three prison staff volunteered, all with live ammunition, to carry out the execution of Stephen Bryant, 44, who Three people were killed In five days in a rural area of ​​the state in 2004.
Bryant has no appeals pending before his scheduled execution at 6 p.m. at the Broad River Correctional Institution death row facility in Columbia.
He can ask the governor for pardon, and this decision will not be announced until minutes before the execution begins. But no South Carolina governor has done so I offered clemency Since the resumption of the death penalty in the United States in 1976.
Its firing squad A long and violent history All over the world. Death by gunfire was used to punish mutinies and desertions, as frontier justice in the American Old West, and as a tool of terror and political repression in the former Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.
But in recent years, it has been revived in the United States. Some lawmakers say it is the quickest and most humane way to execute someone.
This has been the case since a number of botched executions by other methods, including lethal drug injections. South Carolina and other states are struggling to maintain adequate supplies of lethal injection drugs.
Partly for this reason, South Carolina has paused executions for 13 years. The mandate then resumed in September 2024, after which four men were executed by lethal injection and two by firing squad. The state is among several where the electric chair is still legal.
The other three executions by firing squad in the United States were carried out in Utah, none of which have been carried out in that state since 2010. This method also remains legal in Idaho and a fallback method if other methods are not available in Oklahoma and Mississippi.
Bryant admitted to killing Willard “TJ” Tietjen in October 2004 after he stopped at his isolated home in rural Sumter County and said he had car trouble.
Tietjen was shot multiple times. Bryant then answered Tietjen’s phone after it rang several times to tell his wife and daughter that he was the troll and that he had killed them, prosecutors said.
Bryant also killed two men – one before Tietjen and one after him. Authorities said he gave the men a ride, and when they went out to urinate on the side of the road, he shot them in the back.
During the inspection, officers stopped almost everyone driving on dirt roads in the area just east of Columbia, telling people to be wary of anyone they don’t know asking for help.
Bryant’s lawyers said he was upset in the months leading up to the killing, and begged a probation agent and his aunt for help because he couldn’t stop thinking about being sexually abused as a child by a group of relatives. They said he tried to cope by using methamphetamine and smoking joints sprayed with bug killer.
Bryant would be the 43rd man killed on a court-ordered execution so far this year in the United States. At least 14 more are scheduled to be executed during the remainder of 2025 and next year.
Bryant will also be the 50th person executed in South Carolina since the state reinstated the death penalty 40 years ago.
At 6pm on Friday, the curtain will open on the execution chamber in a Colombian prison where fewer than a dozen witnesses sit behind bulletproof glass.
Bryant will be strapped to the chair. The doctor will place a white square with a red bull’s-eye-shaped target over his heart. Bryant’s attorney can read his final statement if he has one. A prison employee would then place a hood over Bryant’s head, walk through the small room and open a black lid where the firing squad would wait.
Without audible or visual warning to witnesses, shooters will fire high-powered rifles from a distance of 15 feet (4.6 m).
The doctor will then come out within a minute or two, examine him and declare him dead.
Lawyers for the last man to be executed by firing squad said the shooters nearly missed his heart Mikal Mahdi. They hardly struck the depths of the heart in which the Mahdi was Excruciating pain Three or four times longer than experts say if his heart was directly injured.