(8 Mar 2025)
RESTRICTION SUMMARY:
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Columbia, South Carolina – 07 March 2025
1. SOUNDBITE (English) Jeffrey Collins, The Associated Press:
++PARTIALLY COVERED++
"my name is Jeffrey Collins. I’m with the Associated Press, and this is the 11th execution I’ve covered in South Carolina. I’ve covered nine lethal injection executions. I covered an execution in the electric chair in 2004, but this is the first firing squad execution I’ve ever covered. Because it is the first firing squad execution in the state of South Carolina, and only the…just the first since 2010, as well.
2. Exterior of prison
3. Wide of protestors
4.Various of protesters holding sings
5. SOUNDBITE (English) Jeffrey Collins, The Associated Press:
++PARTIALLY COVERED++
"You know, in this one, the curtain opens and Brad Sigmon, who is the condemned inmate, he’s strapped into a chair, and there’s a target over his heart. Once the hood was put over his head, it was about 90 seconds to about two minutes before the shots were fired. And during that time, there’s a lot of anxiety. I mean, because obviously you could see that Brad Sigmon was breathing very heavily. He was taking some very deep breaths. And so you’re just waiting until you hear that sound. And when you finally did hear the crack of the gunfire, everyone in that room tensed up a little bit. I know I flinched. I think everyone in that room flinched. I even heard a gasp and then it’s over."
6. Protesters holding signs
7. Zoom out of a South Carolina Department of Corrections logo in speaker’s podium
8. Chrysti Shain, Director Of Communications for South Carolina’s Department of Corrections, addresses media, Upsound (English) Chrysti Shain: "The capital punishment sentence of Brad Keith Sigmon was carried out tonight."
9. SOUNDBITE (English) Jeffrey Collins, The Associated Press:
++PARTIALLY COVERED++
"The state of South Carolina, through its elected representatives, decided a few years ago they wanted to include a firing squad in our execution methods. So my role, is to tell people if we’re going to have the death penalty in the society, to be able to tell people what it looks like, what it sounds like and what actually happens."
8. Various of signs and crowd in front of the prison protesting the execution
STORYLINE:
A South Carolina man convicted of murder was executed by firing squad Friday, the first U.S. prisoner to die by that method in 15 years.
Three volunteer prison employees used rifles to carry out the execution of Brad Sigmon, 67, who was pronounced dead at 6:08 p.m.
Sigmon killed his ex-girlfriend’s parents with a baseball bat in their Greenville County home in 2001 in a botched plot to kidnap their daughter. He told police he planned to take her for a romantic weekend, then kill her and himself.
Sigmon’s lawyers said he chose the firing squad because the electric chair would “cook him alive,” and he feared that a lethal injection of pentobarbital into his veins would send a rush of fluid and blood into his lungs and drown him.
The details of South Carolina’s lethal injection method are kept secret in South Carolina, and Sigmon unsuccessfully asked the state Supreme Court on Thursday to pause his execution because of that.
On Friday, Sigmon wore a black jumpsuit with a hood over his head and a white target with a red bullseye over his chest.
His arms briefly tensed when he was shot, and the target was blasted off his chest. He appeared to give another breath or two with a red stain on his chest, and small amounts of tissue could be seen from the wound during those breaths.
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