Brad Sigmon chose the firing squad. So did Mikal Mahdi. So did Stephen Corey Bryant. Each man, given a menu of three methods by South Carolina law, lethal injection, electrocution or the firing squad, selected the bullet and each selection has been reported, understandably, as a meaningful fact about that man’s own agency in the final weeks of his life. Sigmon’s lawyers said he chose the firing squad because he feared a repeat of the documented lethal injection complications other South Carolina prisoners had suffered, and because the state’s electric chair, more than a century old, carried its own well-documented history of malfunction.1 Mahdi’s attorneys said he feared dying “burned and mutilated” in the chair, or enduring a prolonged death strapped to a gurney and so selected what he judged, of three bad options, to be the least terrible.2 I do not doubt that these were genuine choices, in the narrow sense that each man weighed real information about three real methods and arrived at a preference. The question this chapter interrogates is whether “choice,” used in that narrow sense, can bear the moral weight the method’s defenders ask it to carry, the weight of making an execution more legitimate, more consensual, more acceptable because the person being killed selected the instrument of his own death from a list the state compiled.
Begin with the arithmetic, because it is the strongest empirical statement available about what condemned people actually believe about the needle. Of the seven men South Carolina executed in the fourteen months after it resumed, four chose lethal injection and three chose the rifle. And across the entire modern record, five of the six men shot by American states selected the firing squad to escape something else they feared more. Only one — Ronnie Lee Gardner — chose it for a reason of his own. The firing squad has never once been chosen in the modern era because someone wanted it.
The Menu Was Not the Person’s to Write
Start with the most basic fact about this arrangement: under South Carolina law, a person convicted of a capital crime is sentenced to die by electrocution unless he elects, in writing, either firing squad or lethal injection, if lethal injection is available; if he does not make that election, the statute defaults him to electrocution.3 Every item on that menu ends in the same outcome. The condemned person has no ability to select a fourth option, life or a fifth option, some method not yet on the state’s approved list. His agency is bounded entirely within a set of alternatives the legislature designed, and designed, as the preceding chapters have shown, with known and documented failure modes in every case. Asking a person to choose between three ways of being killed, and then describing the result as a free choice about his own death, performs a kind of moral laundering that is worth naming precisely: it takes an act the state has already decided to carry out regardless of the condemned person’s wishes, and relocates a fragment of decision-making authority to him at exactly the point, method selection, where that authority costs the state nothing and changes nothing about the fact of the killing itself.
This is not a novel observation, and I do not claim originality for it. Legal scholars have made a version of this argument for decades regarding plea bargains, where defendants “choose” to plead guilty in exchange for a lesser sentence, under circumstances where the alternative, a trial carrying a vastly harsher penalty if convicted, makes the “choice” functionally coerced even though no one held a gun to the defendant’s head to extract the plea. The parallel to method-of-execution selection is closer than it might first appear, and in the firing squad’s case, considerably darker, because here someone genuinely is about to hold a gun, not metaphorically, to the person making the choice.
What Mahdi Actually Feared, and What It Tells Us
Mahdi’s stated reasoning is worth returning to directly, because it illustrates the point with unusual clarity. His attorneys said he rejected the electric chair because he feared dying “burned and mutilated,” and rejected lethal injection because he feared a prolonged death strapped to a gurney, a fear grounded in a substantial and growing public record of botched lethal injections producing exactly that outcome. His selection of the firing squad, in other words, was not an affirmative preference for being shot. It was an attempt to avoid two other, more thoroughly feared outcomes, using the best information available to him about which of three bad deaths might be least bad. That the firing squad then produced, in Mahdi’s own case, precisely the kind of prolonged, conscious suffering he was trying to avoid by rejecting lethal injection, is not merely a bitter irony. It is direct evidence that the “choice” South Carolina offered him was not actually a mechanism for securing a better outcome, because the information available to him at the moment of choosing, however carefully he weighed it, could not tell him what has since been documented: that the firing squad’s own failure rate, in this specific cohort, was comparable to or arguably worse than the risks he was trying to avoid. He chose the option that felt, based on incomplete information and understandable fear, like the safer bet. The state let him make that bet, collected his signature on the selection form and then delivered him an outcome indistinguishable in its cruelty from the one he had specifically tried to avoid.
Ramirez, and the Difference Between Real and Hollow Autonomy
It is worth contrasting this hollow version of choice with a genuine expansion of condemned people’s autonomy that the Supreme Court recognized just a few years before Sigmon’s execution. In Ramirez v. Collier, 595 U.S. 411 (2022), the Court held, by a lopsided eight-to-one margin, that a Texas death row prisoner named John Henry Ramirez was likely to succeed on his claim under federal religious liberty law to have his pastor pray aloud and lay hands on him during his execution, over the state’s objection that any physical presence near the gurney posed an unacceptable security risk.4 The Court held that the state had failed to show its blanket restriction was the least restrictive way to address its security concerns, and that a condemned person’s spiritual practice in the final moments of his life deserved real, substantive legal protection, not a symbolic nod.
I have stood in that role, spiritual advisor to a person about to be executed, in twelve execution chambers now and I can tell you directly what Ramirez actually protects: a form of agency that costs the condemned person nothing in terms of the outcome, since the execution proceeds either way, but that restores something real and non-instrumental to the person experiencing it, the presence of another human being, a voice, a hand, in the last minutes of a life the state has already decided to end. That is genuine autonomy, narrow as it is, because it does not depend on the state’s convenience and it changes nothing about the reliability or humaneness of the killing itself. It simply insists that even a person the state has decided to kill retains some sphere of dignity the state must accommodate.
Method-of-execution selection is not this. It is autonomy offered only within a set of options the state itself constructed, each of which ends in death, several of which are independently documented to carry a meaningful risk of prolonged conscious suffering, and none of which the condemned person had any role in designing. Calling this a “choice” in the same breath that one might invoke Ramirez’s genuine, if narrow, expansion of spiritual autonomy collapses two very different things into a single, comforting word.
The Deadline Itself Is Part of the Coercion
It is worth dwelling on the mechanics of how South Carolina actually structures this choice, because the procedural details make the coercion this chapter describes considerably more concrete than an abstract discussion of “menus” might suggest. Under S.C. Code § 24-3-530, once the state Supreme Court sets an execution date, the condemned person’s written election of method is due fourteen days before that date or it is automatically waived; if no election is filed, or if the right of election is waived, the statute specifies that “the penalty must be administered by electrocution.”5 Mikal Mahdi, for instance, was given roughly two weeks before his scheduled execution date to choose among lethal injection, electrocution and the firing squad, a window that maps directly onto the statute’s fourteen-day requirement.5
Notice what this default structure actually does. It does not merely present three options and allow the condemned person to select among them at leisure. It imposes a deadline, under conditions of extraordinary psychological duress, a person newly informed of the exact date of his own death and it backstops that deadline with a default outcome specifically designed, one suspects, to make the deadline itself felt as a genuine threat rather than a bureaucratic formality. A condemned person who becomes too overwhelmed to submit a timely election, who cannot bring himself to sign a form selecting his own method of death, does not thereby preserve some default protection. He is simply assigned the method South Carolina’s own legislative history suggests is the least favored of the three, a structure that functions less like an offer and more like a threat wrapped in the language of choice. This is the coercion this chapter has been describing, made procedurally explicit: choose within days, under the shadow of imminent death or receive the method your own hesitation has selected for you.
Coercion Does Not Require a Single Coercer
A careful reader will have an objection ready: nobody forced Sigmon or Mahdi to select the firing squad specifically; each could, in principle, have chosen lethal injection or accepted the electric chair by default. Doesn’t that make the selection free, in whatever sense matters? I do not think so, and the reason takes us back to first principles about what makes a choice coerced. Coercion does not require a single actor holding a gun to someone’s head and demanding a specific answer. A choice is coerced when every available option is imposed by a party with total power over the chooser, when the chooser has no ability to opt out of the underlying situation and when the party presenting the options benefits from the appearance of consent regardless of which option is selected. All three conditions are satisfied here. South Carolina and Idaho both impose the underlying situation, execution, entirely; the condemned person cannot opt out of being executed by declining to choose a method, since a default method kicks in automatically. And the state benefits, reputationally and legally, from being able to say that the condemned person chose his own death, regardless of which of the three state-designed methods he ultimately selected. This is coercion distributed across a menu rather than concentrated in a single demand, but it is coercion nonetheless and dressing it in the language of choice does not change its structure.
The Ultimate Irony of Mahdi’s Selection
Mahdi’s case contains one further irony this chapter has not yet drawn out. Mahdi selected the firing squad in significant part because he did not want to die “burned and mutilated” in South Carolina’s century-old electric chair, a fear rooted in that method’s own well-documented history of visible physical trauma to the body. His attorneys’ account of his reasoning suggests a man trying, within an impossible set of choices, to preserve some measure of dignity for his body even in death, choosing the option he believed least likely to leave him disfigured. The autopsy that followed his execution found that the bullets missed his heart, striking his liver and abdominal organs instead, producing not the clean, contained wound the target’s placement was designed to guarantee, but an internal injury pattern his own attorneys had to argue about with the state’s pathologist over what exactly had happened and why. Mahdi did not end up burned or mutilated in the way he feared the electric chair might leave him. But neither did he receive the quick, clean death the firing squad’s own advocates promise. He received something in between, a documented, internally messy, extended dying process that his own choice, made in good faith with the best information available to him, was specifically designed to avoid. This is not merely tragic in the individual case. It is the clearest possible illustration of this chapter’s argument: a menu of three flawed options does not become meaningfully safer to navigate simply because the person choosing among them chooses carefully, when the flaws in question are ones the chooser has no way to fully see in advance and no power to correct once selected.
What Idaho Has Not Yet Had to Test
Idaho’s statute, unlike South Carolina’s, does not currently offer condemned prisoners an affirmative selection among methods in the same way; the firing squad is simply the default, with lethal injection available only if the firing squad proves unconstitutional or unavailable. This means Idaho has, for now, avoided even the appearance of offering its death row prisoners the hollow choice this chapter has just critiqued. Whether that is a moral improvement or merely a more honest admission of the state’s actual position, that the condemned person’s preferences were never going to meaningfully constrain the outcome anyway, is a judgment I will leave to the reader. What I will say plainly is this: if Idaho’s legislature or courts eventually add an affirmative selection mechanism, modeled on South Carolina’s, the public should recognize it immediately for what chapter eight has already shown the hood and the shield law to be, and what this chapter has shown the choice itself to be. Not an expansion of dignity. A more comfortable story the state gets to tell about an outcome it had already decided on before the condemned person was ever asked to pick.
Part Two has now walked through all four promises, certainty and humanity and honesty and, in this chapter, choice and shown each of them to fail on the state’s own evidence, produced by the state’s own commissioned autopsies and the state’s own legislative floor debates. Part Three turns from the general argument to the specific people the argument is about: the eight human beings on Idaho’s death row, the officers who will be asked to shoot them, the witnesses who will watch and the money and litigation the state has already committed to a method it built knowing everything this book has just documented.
Notes
011. “South Carolina is set to execute another inmate by firing squad, one month after first such execution in decades,” CBS News, April 9, 2025.
022. “S.C. inmate’s firing squad execution was ‘botched,’ with bullets mostly missing his heart, lawyers say,” NBC News, May 9, 2025; “SC firing squad ‘largely missed’ cop killer Mikal Mahdi’s heart, attorneys say autopsy shows,” The Post and Courier, May 2025 (statements by Mahdi’s attorneys regarding his reasons for choosing the firing squad).
033. S.C. Code Ann. § 24-3-530(A) (2025); “South Carolina Supreme Court upholds constitutionality of methods of carrying out death penalty sentences,” WLTX, July 31, 2024.
044. Ramirez v. Collier, 595 U.S. 411 (2022).
055. S.C. Code Ann. § 24-3-530(A) (2025) (fourteen-day election deadline and default-to-electrocution provision); “South Carolina is set to execute another inmate by firing squad, one month after first such execution in decades,” CBS News, April 9, 2025; “South Carolina executes second man by firing squad in 5 weeks,” PBS NewsHour (Associated Press), April 11, 2025 (describing South Carolina’s method-election procedure and deadline).