In a haunting decision that has reignited debates over capital punishment in the United States, Brad Sigmon, a condemned inmate in South Carolina, has chosen to face death by firing squad, a method not used in an American execution in over a decade and a half. Sigmon’s execution is set for March 7, 2025, in Columbia, South Carolina, marking a grim milestone as the state prepares to carry out its first such killing since resuming executions after a lengthy pause. The 66-year-old’s choice thrusts the nation back into a visceral confrontation with the mechanics of justice, mercy, and the enduring scars of violence—both inflicted and inherited.
Sigmon’s story begins not with the execution chamber but with a brutal crime committed more than two decades ago. In 2001, he was convicted of murdering David and Gladys Larke, the parents of his ex-girlfriend, in their home in Taylors, South Carolina. The killings were savage: Sigmon bludgeoned the couple to death with a baseball bat after an apparent confrontation tied to the end of his relationship with their daughter. In court, he admitted his guilt, offering no resistance to the prosecution’s case. The jury sentenced him to death, a verdict upheld through years of appeals. Yet, beneath the surface of this clear-cut conviction lies a tangled narrative of personal torment that Sigmon’s legal team insists was never fully told.
The condemned man’s attorneys have long argued that his actions in 2001 were the culmination of a life marred by profound suffering. They describe a childhood steeped in physical abuse and neglect, a crucible that shaped a mind already burdened by severe mental illness—conditions they say were passed down through generations, undiagnosed and untreated until it was far too late. In a last-ditch petition filed on February 20, 2025, just weeks before his scheduled execution, his lawyers pleaded with the courts to reconsider his fate. They assert that Sigmon’s trial counsel failed him by not presenting a robust case of mitigating evidence—testimony and records that might have painted a fuller picture of his fractured psyche. The petition contends that jurors, unaware of the depth of his trauma, saw only the monster before them, not the broken man behind the crime.
South Carolina’s return to executions comes after a decade-long hiatus, prompted by a shortage of lethal injection drugs that left death row in limbo. In response, the state legislature expanded its execution methods in 2021, adding the firing squad as an option alongside the electric chair when lethal injection was unavailable. Sigmon, given the choice, opted for the firing squad—a decision that evokes a bygone era of justice, last seen in the U.S. in 2010 when Utah executed Ronnie Lee Gardner by a five-man shooting team. The method is starkly efficient: a prisoner is strapped to a chair, a hood placed over their head, and trained marksmen aim rifles at a target over the heart. Death, experts say, is nearly instantaneous, though the imagery of such an act stirs unease in a society accustomed to the sanitized narrative of lethal injection.
Sigmon’s case has drawn quiet attention, not for its sensationalism but for the questions it raises about culpability and redemption. His lawyers argue that his mental state at the time of the murders rendered him less than fully responsible—a claim that resonates with broader national conversations about how the justice system handles defendants with untreated psychological wounds.
Critics of the death penalty see in Sigmon a tragic figure, a man whose life might have veered differently with intervention. Supporters, however, point to the brutality of his crime and the pain inflicted on the Larke family, whose loss remains an open wound in their community.
As March 7 approaches, South Carolina officials are finalizing preparations at the state’s death chamber, a facility untested by this method in living memory. Sigmon, meanwhile, waits in a cell, his fate sealed by his own hand and a system that offers no further reprieve. His execution, if carried out, will not only end a life but reignite a perennial American debate: whether death, delivered by bullet or needle, can ever truly balance the scales of justice. For now, the nation watches, and Sigmon’s story—equal parts tragedy and reckoning—stands as a somber testament to the complexity of human failing.